Skip to main content

The saddest post

This is probably the saddest post I'll ever write. Just as many of you, today I also received the message that Carl Backstrom died in a tragic car accident last weekend. I met Carl on two events this year: ODTUG and OOW. He was a very nice and energetic guy to talk to, open to everyone who wants to talk to him.
Apart from the neverending fly whiskeys at the the bar in the hotel lobby and the visits to some Bourbon Street bars, I guess a lot of APEX'ers will remember him by his presentation on last ODTUG. Dan McGhan, as an ambassodor for that session, introduced Carl as The UI God. And Carl did his most nervous presentation ever I guess. He struggled with the mic because his hands were too shaky to get the clip fixed the right way. And everybody wondered why he could be so nervous as he knew so much and we knew so little. But that was typically to Carl: Although he knew everything about APEX, Javascript, jQuery and JSON, he still was a regular guy, happy to share his knowledge with others (but rather on a one-to-one basis than in front of a somewhat larger audience).
We will miss him a lot....
My condolences to his family, friends and colleagues.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Roel,

That was a crazy memory (the fly whiskeys), I'll always remember that time with you and Carl.

Great guy, great memories of him.

John.

Popular posts from this blog

Fix Interactive Report headers issue when using a Region Display Selector

When you have multiple Interactive Reports (IR) on your page and use a Region Display Selector to mimic tabs, you might notice some weird behaviour in the IR headings if you switch tabs. The headings are not positioned correctly and you get an extra empty row under the headings. It just looks weird and ugly. But if you resize your browser window, it all looks fine again (until you switch to another tab..) So can we fix this by creating a Dynamic Action that mimics that "browser window resize" event? Yes we can! Create a Dynamic Action that fires on Click of the jQuery selector li.apex-rds-item a . That should fire a JavaScript snippet :  apex.event.trigger(this.triggeringElement, "apexwindowresized"); So now a click on a tab not only switches from one IR to another but also fires that event that will "autofix" the IR headers. A simple solution for an annoying problem. This applies to APEX 5.0, I assume it will be solved in 5.1.

How to create neatly formatted Excel documents using PL/SQL?

If there is a requirement to produce output from an application into Excel, you would probably create a CSV (Comma Separated File) with the data and start Excel to show the data - at least that's what I did...until now. The drawback of this solution is that you could only produce data and no nice layout. But Excel is also capable of opening HTML-files and using this you could create Excel files with data and magnificent layout! Let me give an example: 1. Create a procedure to show the data in formatted in an HTML table. CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE display_emp_list IS v_emp_count NUMBER(5); v_empno NUMBER(8); v_ename VARCHAR2(50); v_job emp.job%TYPE; v_sal emp.sal%TYPE; v_bg_color VARCHAR2(10) := ''; CURSOR c_emp IS SELECT empno, initcap(ename), job, sal FROM emp ORDER BY ename; BEGIN SELECT COUNT(*) INTO v_emp_count FROM emp; owa_util.mime_header('application/ms-excel', FALSE); htp.p('Content...

Refresh selected row(s) in an Interactive Grid

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...