Roels Blog

As a final message from the UKOUG I got the ratings for my session. And they are absolutely amazing (4 = Good; 5 = Very Good; 6 = Excellent):

OverallMy SessionTopic4.465.57Content4.315.46Presentation Skills4.405.37Quality of Slides4.205.43Value4.265.56
Some additional remarks: I wish my line manager (who has a Java background) had seen this presentation as he thinks Apex is too lightweight! Excellent!; Great; Fantastic session; Great!; Would like more. Just what I needed to know to solve some issues, but I've got no tech ability yet - off to read :-); Excellent demo - very interesting. Has shown the possibilities open to us!; lots of javascript is hard to follow.

So I am glad I was in this session ;-).
Thanks everybody who rated me for these great results. I hope I can keep up this level for the next events (O>Zone, ODTUG).

Yesterday evening I received an e-mail from the Speaker Coordinator of ODTUG's Kaleidoscope 2009 that my abstract on How to integrate APEX and Oracle Forms? has been accepted for presentation!
I'm looking forward to present and to meet again all the great people I met at the previous event in New Orleans. I have 'some' time to create the actual presentation - with some nice demo's of course - because the event is starting about half a year from now.
If you have any specific subject on this matter you would like to see during my presentation, please drop a comment!

Today there was a question on the Oracle APEX forum about How to Navigate through the rows of Report using up or down key. This question pop ups now and then and I decided to figure out how to do this. The solution is quite straight forward:

Set the Element Attributes of the columns of the tabular form to :
onkeyup="moveUpDown(this, event)"and create a that function in the HTML Header:

function moveUpDown(pThis, pEvent){
var keynum;
var current = document.getElementsByName( pThis.name );
if(window.event) // IE
{ keynum = pEvent.keyCode; }
else if(pEvent.which) // Netscape/Firefox/Opera
{ keynum = pEvent.which; }
if (keynum == 40 || keynum == 38) // Key-Up or Key-Down
{ for (i=0;i < current.length;i++)
{ if ( current[i].id == pThis.id ) // This is current row
{ if (keynum == 40) // Move down
{ current[Math.min(current.length - 1,i+1)].focus(); }
else // Move up
{ current[Math.max(0,i-1)].focus(); }
}
}
}
}
Check out the live example.
PS: C…

Yesterday evening Logica held the annual LOUD (Logica's Oracle Update Day) event. A tradition is that there is an award for 'Best Acting Consultant' (nothing to do with role playing ;-) ). And this year the winner is....(or are): Rutger and myself! We got the award for our continuous effor to spread the APEX gospel within - and outside - Logica. And of course a bottle of champagne came along...
Apart from that there was a keynote and 12 presentations in four tracks - Fusion, Development, Apps and DBA. Rutger and I also did a Live-Web-Application-Development-with-APEX session (for which we received an addtional bottle of wine....).
All in all a great evening, and it is always good to see so many colleagues (about 160) 1interested in the Oracle toolstack.

In a previous post I described how to replace the default APEX calendar with a better looking jQuery calendar. But one of the steps is that the "Display as" and "HTML Form Element Attributes" needed to be changed. But using jQuery more extensively that isn't even necessary. When you put the following code in an HTML Region on Page 0 (assuming you already included the jQuery stuff), all existing APEX calendar items are automagically 'converted' to jQuery calendar items. (No guarantee though: I didn't test it on all sorts of pages, may be dependent on your template). Look here for a live demo...

$(function(){
// Remove original Datepicker
$("td.datepicker + td" ).remove();
// Add jQuery Datepicker to all Datepicker input fields that are not hidden
$("td.datepicker > input[type!=hidden]" ).datepicker(
{ dateFormat : 'dd/mm/yy'
, closeText : 'X'
, clearText : ''
, showOn : &…

In APEX there is no property to mark a field as a required field (at this moment, could be an enhancement request!). However you can mark the prompt of a field by using the 'Required' template - with or without help. So why not use the APEX Repository to enhance the look-and-feel of your application and show the user which fields are required? And of course we use jQuery to accomplish this.

This is how you do it:
Create an On Demand Application Process (lets call it getRequiredItems) and fire it onLoad - After Header:

DECLARE
CURSOR c_items IS
SELECT item_name
FROM apex_application_page_items
WHERE item_label_template LIKE 'Required%'
AND page_id = :APP_PAGE_ID;

item_list varchar2(32000) := '';
item_sep varchar2(1) := '~';

BEGIN
FOR r_item IN c_items LOOP
item_list := item_list||r_item.item_name||item_sep;
END LOOP;
-- P0_REQUIRED_ITEMS is an hidden item on Page 0
:P0_REQUIRED_ITEMS := substr( item_list, 1, length( item_list ) -1);
END; This process returns the i…

One of the things I talked about during my presentations at OOW and UKOUG is how to replace the (not so good looking) default APEX calendar with a (much nicer) jQuery version. So here are the steps:
1. Download jQuery and jQuery UI from the jQuery website. Upload the jQuery javascript files to your webserver (or into your database if you are using the EPG). Or use GoogleCode...
2. Create a HTML Region on Page 0, containing the references to the uploaded stylesheets and javascript files. Something like this:





3. Set the "Display as" property of the date fields to 'Text Field" and set the "HTML Form Element Attributes" to : class="datefield".
4. Back in Page 0, add a function to the jQuery 'document ready' function to add the jQuery datepicker to all fields with that class:

$(function(){
// Attach a DatePicker icon and function to input fields with class="datefield"
$("input.datefield").datepicker(
{ dateFormat …

In SQL Developer there is an Application Express node. That is a great way to browse through the APEX Repository. And wouldn't it be great if you can use the same technique to browse your Designer repository?
Can we build it...yes we can...
Using User Defined Extensions you can create something like this:'Just' create an XML file to query the Repository and add it as an extension of the Navigator type. This XML file does what is shown in the pic above (it is not finished yet, and anyone who wants to contribute...feel free to add more subnodes/details!). Just click on 'expand source' to see the code.








































SELECT 'Entities' name from dual
union
SELECT 'Functions' from dual





















SELECT b.id, b.name
from ci_app_sys_entities a
, ci_entities b
where a.application_system_reference = :APP_ID
and b.id = a.entity_reference
and 'Entities' = :SEL_NAME
























SE…

This year I decided to do just one post about the UKOUG and not - as previous year - (try to) get out a post every day. Takes the pressure of me...
The first impression is that Birmingham was quite cold this time of year, the second is that the UKOUG seems less crowded this year. The first observation is quite right, the second one is wrong. Due to the shifted schedule of the session, they not all start and end at the same time, so the crowd is more scattered over the day. So no long lines for the food or traffic jams in the Exhibition Hall (the fact was that there where about 2,250 attendees, 'just' 5% less than next year - probably to do with the financial situation out there).
I won't list all the sessions I went to: See the previous post about my intentions - I didn't made all of them...

My personal top 3 this year (in order of appearance):

Beginners' Guide To Trouble-shooting by Jonathan Lewis
I had never seen Jonathan presenting before but it is good to get an int…