The "blind auditions": Evaluating Kscope12 abstracts...

Last week (and both weekends) I evaluated all the abstracts for ODTUG KScope12 in two tracks: APEX and Developer's Toolbox. In the APEX track 76 abstracts where submitted, Developer's Toolbox has just a few more, 82. All the abstracts will be evaluated by a team of (around) 8 people, so it doesn't all depend on my rating ;-)
For the first time, the abstracts where anonymous. So you don't know who wrote the abstract when rating it. In some cases, you can guess (and some had their own name in the abstract or summary, so that's easy). But I have to say, it makes it more difficult to evaluate. Because, for some people it doesn't really matter what the abstract says, you know it will be good anyhow (and for other ones, it is just the other way round). But luckily we have to rate the presenters as well - as far as you know them.
We had to rate every abstract between 0 and 5, where 5 is a top one. My totals are: little under 20% I rated as 5, almost 40% got a 4, 30% received a 3 and the rest is 2 or lower.
The hottest subject in the APEX track is, without any doubt, mobile development. Seems like a lot of presenters are anxiously awaiting the next APEX release. In Developer's Toolbox, the subjects are more diverse, but, to my surprise, analytic functions are a trending topic! Not that these are new, but there seems to be a more general adoption and interest in this feature.

And what did I learn from these "blind auditions"?
That it is very hard to write a good abstract. And when you submit one, there always a line saying: Don't copy your abstract as a summery (or the other way round). They have two different goals. The abstract should convince the evaluator to select your presentation, while the summary should convince the conference attendee to attend your session. So you should give away more in the abstract - but please, not pages long - and maybe just make people curious in the summary part.

But seeing all these great abstracts, I am really sure that Kscope12 will be even better than this years!

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

Roels Blog

Search This Blog