Back from OOW I found the Oracle Application Express Forms Converter book in my pile of mail. I received a free copy - just adding the word 'free' in order to prevent a claim from the FTC... ;-) for writing a review on this blog. I haven't had a change to read the book, although it is only 172 pages, significantly less than the other Oracle related books on my shelf. If you are interested in a review now, please read Marc Sewtz's blogpost - he has already read it and wrote a review. I will try to write the review somewhere next week (with the usual disclaimers applied). If you're curious, you can read a preview chapter of the book here.
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
Comments
Any book that can limit itself to a readable nr of pages is probably Worthy. Had a look over at Marc Sewtz' and he seemed positive.
APEX is the natural successor to 90% of Forms deployments: Simple, Lightweight and easy to deploy.
Thumbs up to both the book and the tool.