OOW2010 Thursday

The last day of this year's conference. And the day after the event. It was noticeable that it already was a lot more quiet than the days before. And that sure had an effect on the turnout of my session. Being scheduled on the last day isn't an advance.
Just before my session about Edition Based Redefinition and APEX started I checked my demos and they ran perfect. And after my session they ran perfect as well. But during my session they didn't perform at all - and Marco was enjoying that on the front row... But luckily I had a backup: a number of screenprints. Apart from this minor inconvenience the presentation went pretty good! Afterwards I got some really nice compliments of Brynn, Patrick and Joel.
Then it was time to wind down. First in the OTN lounge, and then at the "It's a wrap!" party. That party was really nice: sun, beer and good music. A perfect way to end a good Oracle Open World
See you all again next year...or earlier when possible!

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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 Employees tab…

Adding items to your Interactive Grid Toolbar

The APEX Interactive Grid uses the Toolbar widget to create the default Toolbar showing the Search box, Actions menu, Save button etc. And since quite a while there is a nice Plugin "Extend IG Toolbar" by Marko Goricki that makes it very easy to add additional buttons to the Toolbar.

But what if you need more than a button?
Inspecting the contents of widget.toolbar.js, you can easily spot there can be added more to the Toolbar than just a button: The type of control, available values:
"STATIC", "TEXT", "SELECT", "BUTTON", "MENU", "RADIO_GROUP", "TOGGLE".
The first example will show a way to easily switch from one filter to another. Of course we could use the standard functionality and create two different Report views, but using a Radio Group on the Toolbar gives a more "Tab" like user experience.

So how can we create a Radio Group that looks like a switch in the Toolbar?
In the Javascript Code …

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 processing y…

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