Skip to main content

ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008 : The day before

Image
By

After an 18 hour trip from my home I arrived at the Sheraton in New Orleans. Luckily this time I also got my bag (at OOW 2007 it arrived a day later). A small wonder, because my transfer time in Houston was reduced from 1 ½ hour to 20 minutes due to the border control officer, who seemed to be very interested in all my predecessors in the queue. So I had to run from gate E to C. On the way I saw at a screen that The Netherlands where ahead against France with 1-0. At the time I arrived in New Orleans I called home and found out it turned out be a 4-1 victory!

When I came outside of the airport the tropical atmosphere hit me. It was about 32 C, but very very humid. After dropping of my luggage and freshening up a little in my room at the 43 floor, overlooking the Mississippi, I went out into the French Quarter. This area is packed with bars and restaurant and every bar seemed to have it’s own live music. I managed to stay awake until 9pm - that makes about 22 hours awake - and slept until 6:30 the next morning.

When I stepped out for a nice and quiet stroll through the French Quarter and the riverside it was so hot and humid already - or still - that my sunglasses blurred immediately. Like stepping into a tropical swimming pool. After my walk I took the old steamboat for a trip over the Mississippi and strolled over the Cajun / Zydeco and Tomato festival. New Orleans is very very lively: there is music on every corner and food stalls in between them. And of course the obvious street artists painting, breakdancing and reading hands. In this part of town there is not much damage left from Katrina three years ago, but also it didn’t suffer that much from The Storm as the locals seem to call it.

I hope I am over my jetlag already and ready for the start of the conference tomorrow morning at 8:30 : a full day ‘APEX Must hear success stories’

For those who are more of the visual type, I uploaded some pictures here.
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

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

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