Skip to main content

Oracle Application Express Forms Converter Book - Review

By
As I promised earlier I should write a review of the Oracle Application Express Forms Converter book by Douwe Pieter van den Bos. I finally found the time to work it through...it doesn't take that much time, because it is "just" 150 pages thick (or thin).
The book contains 8 chapters, in which the reader is guided through an Forms2APEX conversion project from start to finish. It starts of with "Understanding your Project" (1), wherein understanding the reasons for conversion as well as the functionality of the Forms application is stressed as important, because these will influence the way you'll solve things in the APEX application. One or more examples should have been useful here.
The next chapter, "Preparing your Forms Conversion" (2), covers the creation of XML files from the source files. BTW, not only Forms, also "Reports" are - briefly - touched (and can be converted as well). Also different ways of creating a target database are mentioned (but IMHO you usually can just re-use your current Forms development environment).
Chapter (3), "Create your Forms Conversion Project", covers the next step in the project: uploading the XML files and understanding the Project Overview Page.
The next chapter is about "Planning your Project" (4). It shows how you can dive into the different components (blocks, triggers and what's not), and how to use the Annotations, Tags, Assignments and Applicablity to estimate the work you've done and still have to do. That last one is rather difficult, because only the number of objects-to-do are counted - and, as we all know - that doesn't tell you everything about the time needed to accomplish things. But it might help you in planning and monitoring the project.
Chapter (5), "Getting your Logic Right!", is probably the key-chapter of the book. The difference between Original, Enhanced and Custom Query is explained in detail. Alas one line "Implementing the business logic is done post-generation, execpt for some Post-Query triggers" says it all... I now the conversion utlity is not a silver bullet, but some examples on how to convert Forms logic to the APEX equivalent would have been a very useful add-on!
Chapter (6) covers "Generating your Application", and doesn't tell anything new if you're already an APEX Developer (actually there is nothing more to tell about it than what covered here).
"Reviewing and Customizing your Application" is the penultimate chapter (7). It handles tweaking the generated LOV's, Titles and how to create a Validation based on what was an WHEN-VALIDATE-RECORD trigger in the Form.
The last chapter (8), on "Delivering your Application", discusses (very briefly) how to create an Application Export and import that in a Test-, Acceptance or Production environment. No specific Forms2APEX stuff.

All in all it is a good book when you need an overview of the steps you have to take for converting an Oracle Forms application to APEX - more on a Project Management level than a Developer level. If you really need to get your hands dirty and do the actual conversion yourself, this book is just the beginning of a great adventure...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Filtering in the APEX Interactive Grid

By
Remember Oracle Forms? One of the nice features of Forms was the use of GLOBAL items. More or less comparable to Application Items in APEX. These GLOBALS where often used to pre-query data. For example you queried Employee 200 in Form A, then opened Form B and on opening that Form the Employee field is filled with that (GLOBAL) value of 200 and the query was executed. So without additional keys strokes or entering data, when switching to another Form a user would immediately see the data in the same context. And they loved that. In APEX you can create a similar experience using Application Items (or an Item on the Global Page) for Classic Reports (by setting a Default Value to a Search Item) and Interactive Reports (using the  APEX_IR.ADD_FILTER  procedure). But what about the Interactive Grid? There is no APEX_IG package ... so the first thing we have to figure out is how can we set a filter programmatically? Start with creating an Interactive Grid based upon the good o...
1 comment
Read more

apex_application.g_f0x array processing in Oracle 12

By
If you created your own "updatable reports" or your custom version of tabular forms in Oracle Application Express, you'll end up with a query that looks similar to this one: then you disable the " Escape special characters " property and the result is an updatable multirecord form. That was easy, right? But now we need to process the changes in the Ename column when the form is submitted, but only if the checkbox is checked. All the columns are submitted as separated arrays, named apex_application.g_f0x - where the "x" is the value of the "p_idx" parameter you specified in the apex_item calls. So we have apex_application.g_f01, g_f02 and g_f03. But then you discover APEX has the oddity that the "checkbox" array only contains values for the checked rows. Thus if you just check "Jones", the length of g_f02 is 1 and it contains only the empno of Jones - while the other two arrays will contain all (14) rows. So for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Refresh selected row(s) in an Interactive Grid

By
In my previous post I blogged about pushing changed rows from the dabatase into an Interactive Grid . The use case I'll cover right here is probably more common - and therefore more useful! Until we had the IG, we showed the data in a report (Interactive or Classic). Changes to the data where made by popping up a form page, making changes, saving and refreshing the report upon closing the dialog. Or by clicking an icon / button / link in your report that makes some changes to the data (like changing a status) and ... refresh the report.  That all works fine, but the downsides are: The whole dataset is returned from the server to the client - again and again. And if your pagination size is large, that does lead to more and more network traffic, more interpretation by the browser and more waiting time for the end user. The "current record" might be out of focus after the refresh, especially by larger pagination sizes, as the first rows will be shown. Or (even wors...
Post a Comment
Read more