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.
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 ...
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.