Skip to main content

UKOUG Day 1

Image
By
After a rough flight yesterday I arrived in Birmingham. The city has a complete Christmans atmosphere, as you might expect at this time of year. There even is a 'real' Frankfurter Christmas market with 'Beer und Bratwurst' and hot wine - and lots and lots of other more or less Christmas related stuff. I made some pictures, but on my (new) laptop the drivers for the camera are not installed yet, so I'll add the pictures later on...

'MeThis morning the UKOUG started with two keynotes on '30 Years of Oracle'. The one of Tom Kyte was amusing as ever. At that moment I realised that I volunteered to introduce him this afternoon, probably for an audience of over 1,000 people. I'm more nervous about that than about my own presentation!
After that I went to an presentation on APEX 3.1 New Features. This version is already available on OTN (not for download, but to play with) and has a lot of interesting and nice looking features. For instance the end-user can dynamically change reports by adding sorts, filters, computations, charts and colors - and save these reports for later use. The 3.1 versions should be available for production around March 2008.

The second session was about Forms Upgrade, Integration and Lifecycle using PITSS.CON : A repository based addition for Forms and Reports Development. To me, the most interesting part is that PITSS is extending PITTS.CON to extract business rules and the data access layer form Forms and put it in the database. The main reason to do so is to 'service enable' the Forms-business-logic, in order to open it up for other applications. Another use can be : An easy change of the (Forms) UI to another UI - but that's just my addition. Btw : PITSS.CON has some overlap with the Designer functionality, so using both products at the same time may be challenging....
'Tom
Now I just finished my own presentation about the transformation of Oracle Forms to Java. It all went very well. The room was filled for 2/3 with about 75 people (including Grant Ronald and Duncan Mills), I finished right on schedule and even got time to answer some questions. Now waiting for the introduction of Tom Kyte - who happens to sit right behind me in the Speaker Lounge at this moment.

The introduction of Tom went rather well. Luckily you don't see that much of the audience at such a large stage and with all those lights. Marco (of AMIS) took some pictures, I'll post them later on. Tom's session on 11g New Features for DBA's was also very good - even for a non-DBA like me. Some slide pics are here, here and here.

Later that evening the Blogger Meetup was held at a pub close to the ICC. It was nice to meet a lot of those 'virtual' persons in real life (again).

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 old Employ
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

Stop using validations for checking constraints !

By
 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
Post a Comment
Read more