Skip to main content

OBUG 2009

Yesterday (March 31), the Oracle Benelux User Group held its (almost) annual conference in Antwerp. Apart from the three central keynotes, the around 600 attendees (my guess) could pick one of the 10 concurrent sessions - in three timeslots. The conference was mainly 'Apps' driven: most sessions where from an Apps-perspective - so there were only a few interesting sessions from a database / development point of view.
José Lazares (Vice President Applications Development and Applications Integration Architecture) did the first keynote. The message I got from it was: more BI dashboards presenting data from different sources (a lot of screen shots with nice graphs). I skipped the first concurrent session, because I had to be on our stand. The second sort of keynote was by Tom Sligting, a Dutch stand-up comedian. He had some very funny jokes, but had a hard time with the sometimes barely-responsive audience.
Lonneke & Lucas did a duo presentation on SOA Suite 11g (in fact it was a trio presentation, because Ronald ran a demo from the projector room - 50 meters from the stage). Seems like 11g is aiming at building more integrated solutions, because you now can use the different tools in a single project.
The last session was 'Forms 2.0' by Wilfred van der Deijl, who presented his view on migrating from an Oracle Forms to an ADF world. I was already familiar with his work, especially the OraFormsFaces stuff, because I use his technique for a part of the Oracle Forms/APEX integration (which I will present during ODTUG Kaleidoscope, - shameless plug - ).
All in all a good, well organised day, with - and I have to admit - really good food...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 o...

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 ...