Skip to main content

Creating a Cool Dashboard in APEX

By
In my current project I have to create a dashboards that reflects the actual (and historical) situation in a factory. At first I tried something like the dashboards Anychart provides on it's site, like this. It is possible to create that kind of stuff in APEX, but then you have to generate all the XML data by yourself. And the fastest way to do something is...don't do it at all.

So, since the subregion-feature of APEX 4, you can achieve the same results by only tweaking the Chart XML itself a "little". And now I have something like this:
Kinda cool huh? I also created an example on apex.oracle.com (refreshes every 3 seconds with random data).

Comments

Iloon said…
This is VERY nice. :-)

I am impressed.

Iloon
5:05 pm
Patrick Wolf said…
Very nice!
5:09 pm
Hilary Farrell said…
Hi Roel,

Linear gauge charts are not one of our supported and licensed chart types within Oracle Application Express. Only those chart types exposed via our Create wizards are supported.

Regards,
Hilary
6:04 pm
Martin D'Souza said…
Very cool!
10:17 pm
Buzz Killington said…
What is the "small" tweak to the XML that you need to make? Care to share?
1:30 am
Roel said…
@Buzz: See the (changed) example. You can see the customized (non formatted) Chart XML using the little icons in the report on the right hand side.

@Hilary: "Not licensed" = "illegal"? That's strange, because I only used the default/standard APEX Features. Also your "support clause" surprises me...so Custom Chart XML isn't supported at all??? (I guess that's not what you mean, but pls clarify).
11:21 am
Hilary Farrell said…
Hi Roel,

Our charts license allows Oracle APEX customers to create the chart types that we expose via our Create wizards i.e.

* Column (2D,3D,Stacked,Stacked %,Range)
* Horizontal (2D,3D,Stacked,Stacked %,Range)
* Pie & Doughnut
* ScatterMarker
* Line
* Dial & Dial % Gauges
* Candlestick
* Project & Resource Gantts

Linear gauge charts are not one of our licensed chart types, and are not exposed via our Create wizards. Therefore, unless you obtain a separate license from AnyChart, you are not licensed to use that chart type in Oracle Application Express. There tends to be some confusion around this area, but hopefully this will help to clarify things.

Regards,
Hilary
12:06 pm
Buzz Killington said…
Thank you for the update and the effort!
2:59 pm
Anonymous said…
How do you create the ability to have chart data change like this?
5:26 pm
Roel said…
@Wayne : The query for every chart is something like :

select trunc(dbms_random.value(50,100)),100
from dual

and the charts refresh is set to every 3 seconds.
8:49 am
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 old Employ
1 comment
Read more

apex_application.g_f0x array processing in Oracle 12

By
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
Post a 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