OOW 2010 about to start!

I just printed out my boarding pass for my 10.50 flight tomorrow morning. From Amsterdam, via Minneapolis to San Francisco takes around 11,5 hours time, with 1,5 hours overlay in Minneapolis. I hope that'll be enough to pass the US-border control!

It will be a busy week, with lots of sessions and networking events. I won't put my whole session schedule up here, that might set the expectation that I also will attend all these sessions...

But in short: Sunday afternoon will mostly be filled by the ODTUG APEX sessions, and maybe pick a part of the Welcome keynote alongside.

Monday will be a combination of good old PL/SQL, APEX, Fusion, Fusion Apps, Exadata. Tuesday has a similar picture: APEX, ESB, JavaFX and Tom Kyte's keynote. Wednesday is of course Larry's keynote (with or without Iron Man), and some database related sessions. Thursday I've planned to attend two more APEX sessions, before I have mine: at 12:30 in Hotel Nikko called "Using Edition-Based Redefinitions in an Oracle Application Express environment". And in my current schedule that also will be the last one. Funny, 'cause last year I had the opening session (Sunday 8.30 AM) and this year they put me way in the back of the schedule...

Also the networking part is packed: The ACE Dinner on Sunday; on Monday the ODTUG meetup, Benelux Happy Hour and the OTN Night clash more or less; Tuesday afternoon there is a One Logica lunch (where I can meet all colleagues present at the venue), and in the evening there is the traditional Blogger Meetup, followed by the APEX Meetup and the Benelux Cocktail Party (sounds like too much drinking...). Wednesday and Thursday no specialties: "just" the Appreciation event and the "It's a wrap!" thing.

Really looking forward to it!

Comments

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 old Employ

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

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