UKOUG is right around the corner!

In a few days I will pack my bags and head off to Birmingham for the 2008 version of the UKOUG. I am looking forward in meeting old friends and making new ones. And of course - attend some of the most interesting sessions available in Europe!
While I was setting up my agenda for the week I noticed that on every day the first session starts at 9:25. That makes it a lot easier to network at night...
My agenda contains a mix of Fusion, DBA, Development sessions and of course APEX (all though there is not that many APEX sessions). It is gonna be a busy week!

Monday	Advanced SQL for PL/SQL Programmers
	Oracle Application Express Now and in the Future
	Oracle Forms: Features and Future
	Building Your Business Services in Oracle ADF: A Case Study of Redeveloping an Oracle Forms Application
	UKOUG 2008 Opening Party
Tuesday	Follow up session to 'Oracle Exadata - Extreme Performance'
	Beginners' Guide to Trouble-shooting
	Extreme Reusability - New Features in Oracle ADF 11g (FTMS)
	Designing and Building Security at the Data Layer
	Community Focus Pubs
Wednesday	Changing to the World with Oracle Web Services and the Service Oriented Architecture (FTGTS)
	The Fusion Development Platform (FTMS)
	Migrating Oracle Forms to SOA and J2EE (Oracle ADF)
	Advanced Oracle Application Express Tips and Techniques
	Performance Tuning Basics
	Visual Data Modeling with Oracle SQL Developer
	25th Year Celebration Party
Thursday	Materialized Views Administration and Internals
	Being Steven Feuerstein (IMHO wins the Best-Title-Award)
	Designing PL/SQL applications
	(Re)Developing a logistic application in APEX in the real world (that's mine)
	Securing an APEX application on a Microsoft platform
Friday	Oracle Beehive - The only complete and open platform for integrated, secure collaboration
	Advanced SQL Features

Comments

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

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

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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