Skip to main content

Riga Dev Day 2015

While waiting at the airport for my plane back to Amsterdam, I have some time to write down my experiences of the last few days in Riga.
After arriving in the hotel, I walked to the old part of town and strolled around. The old part looks very medieval (it is - so no surprises there) with cobblestone streets, old houses and very few cars. Nice!
Then back to hotel, in time for the "official" speaker tour. With a small bus we toured around town for 45 minutes and we walked the old town (again) for another 45 minutes - but now including some stories about the buildings we saw. It was rather cold, so I was quite happy when we got back to the bus and on to the restaurant for the speakers dinner. All very well organised "extra's". Thanks guys!

The event itself was held in a movie theatre in a mall. About 400 attendees filled up the large keynote room pretty quickly. The nice thing about this setting is that the screens are huge and excellent: I've never seen my presentation that big! Also the fact that some people were eating popcorn during the presentations added something to the "movie effect". I would like to see more events in venues like this!
As they conference was a combination of three user groups (Google Dev, Java and Oracle) it was very easy to attend a session that is way out of my comfort zone. So I did a few sessions on Android, Node and REST API's. Just to see something different. My own session was well attended with around 50 people. Just a few of them were actual APEX Developers, the rest was DBA, PL/SQL - or out of their Google/Java comfort zone.
After the event we grabbed a cab bak to the hotel to drop off our bags and a cab back into the old town for the afterparty. Music, some food and lots of drinks. It was fun. Afterwards a cab back to to hotel for the after-afterparty. 
This morning after checking out, I walked back into the old city to check out the parts I haven't seen yet, like the big market halls. Then taxi back to the airport...

All in all a great event, very well organised. Thanks for inviting me - and thanks to the Oracle ACE program for the support !

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

apex_application.g_f0x array processing in Oracle 12

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

Filtering in the APEX Interactive Grid

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 old Employ

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