Skip to main content

#APEXinAntwerp - The first OBUG APEX SIG

By
Last Thursday the first official OBUG (Oracle Benelux User Group) was held in Antwerp with APEX 4.0 as the main subject of all presentations. Over 80 attendees attended this event and listened to six presentations during the day. Although it was very warm (some people would claim even 'hot') in the room, (almost) nobody feel asleep - for long.
After a warm welcome by Dimitri, Patrick Wolf showed a lot of the cool new APEX 4.0 features in a 1,5 hour presentation and demo. 
Next another Patrick (Hellemans) from InterAccess did a presentation on The Maturity Level of APEX.  According to Gartner and Forrester APEX will kick off (even more) the next two years! He also demo'ed an APEX Framework they made, to enable a kick start for APEX Application Development. Looked very good!
After a lunch with some nice sandwiches, I did my first gig on "Developing a Google Visualization Plugin for APEX 4.0" - the same as I will do next week at ODTUG. I think it went pretty well for a first time - the timing was exactly one hour ! - but I will make some minor adjustments for the next run. 
Next Dimitri was on with a nice presentation about Websheets and Team Development. He especially showed how easy it is to incorporate feedback in your application and transform feedback into bugs or enhancement requests. Will really change the way we'll develop and maintain APEX applications!
Olivier Dupont and Jan Huyzentruyt of iAdvise showed a lot of new 4.0 features that are not as eye-cathing as the Websheets, Team Development, Plug Ins etc, but will have a major impact on the speed of development and the quality of the work we'll deliver. Especially the comparison between the 'old' and the 'new' way of working was very interesting.
Last but not least was Iloon Ellen from Oracle, who focused on the enhancements made in the Tabular Forms. In the 'old' - or 'current' - version, Tabular Forms are always cumbersome. But the APEX Dev Team made some great enhancements to it, so handcrafted Tabular Forms (using apex_item) will not be necessary as often as they do now! Great stuff.
After the show was closed, Dimitri, Iloon, Learco and myself had a nice dinner on one of many outside terraces in Antwerp. It was a long (from 6AM to 11PM), hot and tiresome day, but definitely worthwhile!
The next APEX OBUG SIG will be .... on October 27 and 28 in Brussels. In conjunction with ODTUG's OPP and APEXposed. That definitely will be an event not-to-miss, so block these dates in your agenda!
Labels:
Location: Lange Gasthuisstraat 45, 2000 Antwerpen, België

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Filtering in the APEX Interactive Grid

By
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...
1 comment
Read more

Stop using validations for checking constraints !

By
 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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Refresh selected row(s) in an Interactive Grid

By
In my previous post I blogged about pushing changed rows from the dabatase into an Interactive Grid . The use case I'll cover right here is probably more common - and therefore more useful! Until we had the IG, we showed the data in a report (Interactive or Classic). Changes to the data where made by popping up a form page, making changes, saving and refreshing the report upon closing the dialog. Or by clicking an icon / button / link in your report that makes some changes to the data (like changing a status) and ... refresh the report.  That all works fine, but the downsides are: The whole dataset is returned from the server to the client - again and again. And if your pagination size is large, that does lead to more and more network traffic, more interpretation by the browser and more waiting time for the end user. The "current record" might be out of focus after the refresh, especially by larger pagination sizes, as the first rows will be shown. Or (even wors...
Post a Comment
Read more