No Collaborate 2010 for me - thanks to the Icelandic (bank) e-ruption...

I was really looking forward to fly out last Saturday to Las Vegas for my first visit to Collaborate. But the Icelandic vulcano with the unpronounceable name (something like "Eiwjhfdjaajfkjjsirsuj"), threw soot in the food - which is a direct translation of a Dutch saying, the corresponding English saying would be something like: "spoil-sported it".
So both my presentations are canceled, sorry for those who had planned to attend!
The good thing is, I got a 100% refund of both flights and hotel from Expedia, with one single phone call of a few minutes on Sunday. A great service, that I didn't expect, so I was happily surprised by that!
So at least I got cashes for ashes, bucks for dust....
I really hope the air will be clean before the next big conference, ODTUG Kaleidoscope in Washington, and hope to see you all there!

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Filtering in the APEX Interactive Grid

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Stop using validations for checking constraints !

If you run your APEX application - like a Form based on the EMP table - and test if you can change the value of Department to something else then the standard values of 10, 20, 30 or 40, you'll get a nice error message like this: But it isn't really nice, is it? So what do a lot of developers do? They create a validation (just) in order to show a nicer, better worded, error message like "This is not a valid department". And what you then just did is writing code twice : Once in the database as a (foreign key) check constraint and once as a sql statement in your validation. And we all know : writing code twice is usually not a good idea - and executing the same query twice is not enhancing your performance! So how can we transform that ugly error message into something nice? By combining two APEX features: the Error Handling Function and the Text Messages! Start with copying the example of an Error Handling Function from the APEX documentation. Create this function

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