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Showing posts from 2012

Changed rendering (and evaluation) behaviour in APEX 4.2

Today we ran into a problem in our recently upgraded APEX environment. In one of the pages we had a report defined on a pipelined table function. This function also changed a package global variable. The value of that global variable is used as a source for a page item that shows up in the same region just below the report. This ran fine in 4.1, it runs fine when we set the "Compatibility Mode" to 4.1 as well. But if we set that mode to 4.2...the page item shows...nothing !!! What happened? According to the help on that Compatibility Mode property, items (and regions) in a display point are evaluated before rendering that display point. This is done to find out whether items / regions are displayed or not - to support the grid layout. To dig a little deeper (thanks to Patrick Wolf, who was helping us with this issue): As soon as the region grid is calculated, the same is done for the page item grid in the region which gets painted next. This calculation also has to determ...

Looking forward to UKOUG 2012

As every year, the UKOUG conference is planned in the first week of December - and therefore as always nicely clashes with a Dutch national event, called "Sinterklaas" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinterklaas for the background information on that event!). Luckily my kids are somewhat older now (and "non-believers"), so we can plan our own private event in the weekend afterwards.... Nevertheless, I am really looking forward to this years event! It will be my sixth consecutive attendance (and presentation), so I know what to expect: Great content, good atmosphere, lousy weather... As usual I used the schedule planner (which has a great integrated App now as well) to guide me through these three days. I am really looking forward to two sessions in particular (apart from my own at Monday afternoon): "Deploying and Developing Application Express with Oracle Pluggable Databases" by David Peake and "Oracle APEX - Websockets (or When Push Co...

OOW2012 - PL/SQL Enhancements in Oracle 12c

So what's planned for the upcoming 12c database regarding PL/SQL? What follows is a list of what are presented as the most important changes... Improved PL/SQL - SQL interoperability You don't need to specify the type at the schema level when you want to use it SQL, specification at the package level is sufficient and you can bind it to SQL directly; Get the performance of SQL with the clarity and reusability of PL/SQL by adding a pragma UDF to a schema level PL/SQL function - almost as fast as pure SQL; You can declare a PL/SQL function in the WITH clause of a subquery: with function x(param) <body> end x; select x(p) from t; Using the "with" construct is 3.8x faster than using an old fashioned PL/SQL function, function with pragma is 3.9x faster, pure SQL is 5x faster. A new security capability Grant access to a PL/SQL unit by granting a role to a PL/SQL unit, where the role contains the required rights for accessing the tables - so a function...

OOW2012 - The Oracle Database 12c: The Pluggable Database

To me, one of the biggest announcements this week was not that Larry finally learnt how to use a clicker, but the disclosure of some of the new features of the next version of the Oracle Database. This version is also the " first real multi-tenant database ". So what does this mean? In the current version of the database the core Oracle data dictionary is mixed up with the tables, packages etc you created yourself. All information is stored in the same obj$, tab$ and source$ tables. In 12c there is an architectural separation between the core Oracle system and your own application. The core Oracle data dictionary is called the Container Database (CDB). The part of the database that contains your own code is called the Pluggable Database (PDB). This PDB also contains its own datadictionary with it own obj$, tab$ etc tables. So it is a sort of hierarchy: objects are first located in the PDB, when they're not found there, information from the CDB is retrieved. The bes...

OOW 2012 Schedule

As always it is hard to create a schedule for Oracle Open World. Knowing that there are about 100 concurrent sessions, you'll miss 99% of all the content... Nevertheless, I combined sessions around APEX, Database Development, Cloud etc into an interesting schedule for the upcoming week...spiced up with the social/networking events as usual. So for what it's worth, here it is (and note my own session as almost the closing session of the event..):

Bye Logica. Hello APEX-Evangelists!

17 years ago I started at working at CMG. 17 years! That's a long time, and a lot of things have changed during that period. CMG became LogicaCMG. LogicaCMG became Logica. And recently Logica merged with CGI - and the new name will probably be just CGI in a few months or years. So the company grow from a few thousand people mainly in The Netherlands and the UK to over 70,000 worldwide now. And you can imagine the structure of the organisation changed as well, from a team oriented approach to a more multi layered management structure. And, in my experience, meanwhile the culture of the organisation changed from a employee centred company to a shareholder (a.k.a. "money") centred organisation. So Logica as it is now, is a completely different company is the one I started 17 years ago. So, a few months ago, that made me think: Would i spend the rest of my working life - what is still 20 years or so - at this company. And my answer was "No". So what's next? I...

APEXposed! 2012. Better than ever....

No need to say more...impressive list of speakers, great city (I heard), and good fun! All other info and sign-up on http://odtugapextraining.com .

Handling errors in tabular forms - don't forget the commit...

I always found manual tabular forms in APEX a sort of pain in the butt. I tried to avoid them whenever I could. But now and then there is no escape... One reason why I dislike them is, when your submit process throws an error, your page is repainted again with all the fields in the original state. Sigh.. So you have to re-enter all your data and don't make that mistake again. The standard solution is to fill a collection with all your data on page load, build your tabular form on top of that collection, save the entered values into the collection and finally save the contents of your collection (or the entered values themselves, as they are equal on this point) to the real tables. So I implemented that. But to my suprise, it didn't work! Debugging, looking at session state, etc nothing helped. Until I got the luminous idea of putting a "commit;" in the process that saves the entered values into the collection. That helped a lot... I always thought that all ...

5 Cool Things you can do with HTML5 (p4)

The fourth part of this series of posts will cover Notifications . When you are a user of GMail and using Chrome, you probably are familiar with those little boxes that popup when you've got new mail. Those type of notifications you can create in your APEX application as well - using HTML5! Alas, at this moment, these type of notifications only work in Chrome. In Firefox you can add this extension so it'll work in that browser as well. The other ones will follow - sooner or later... You can also use this plugin that mimics this feature - to be safe on every platform, but that one will appear in your browser, so that's not a desktop notification. But how do you create a real desktop notification? As usual with HTML5, you just need a few lines of code. The code below is executed in a Dynamic Action when a button is pressed: function RequestPermission (callback) { window.webkitNotifications.requestPermission(callback); } function showNotification(){ if (window.we...

5 Cool Things you can do with HTML5 (p3)

Location, location, location, it's all about location... Probably one of the most frequently used HTML5 features is geoLocation. Why? Because it is very easy to use and cool too! You can check the corresponding example page on http://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=22115:GEOLOCATION . So how does that work? In fact it is just a few lines of code. First include the Google Javascript API ( <script type="text/javascript" src="http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false"></script> ). The next step (on Page Load) is to actually get the current position of the browser device by if (navigator.geolocation) { navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(showLocation, handleError); } else { error('GeoLocation is not supported in this browser'); } Where showLocation specifies the callback method that retrieves the location information. This method is called asynchronously with an object corresponding to the Position object wh...

5 Cool Things you can do with HTML5 (p2)

As promised in the previous post in this series , this one will be about Web Storage. Before the HTML5 era, you could store information on the client (browser) using a cookie. But that has two disadvantages (or limitations). First of all, a cookie's size is limited to 4096 bytes (but that differs over the different browsers and versions) and secondly - even more important - is that a cookie is always sent with every HTTP request, resulting in more data being sent over the wire. And that reduces scalability and decreases performance. Using HTML5 you can use another type of storage, or even two types: sessionStorage and localStorage. In most browsers the storage is limited to 2.5Mb, but some go up to 5Mb or even unlimited. See this page for all limits per browser. And it is important to know that sessionStorage lives as long as your browser/tab is open - and is deleted on close, while localStorage stays on the client - even after a shutdown of the machine. In a storage onl...

5 Cool Things you can do with HTML5 (p1)

Recently I did a presentation with the title " 5 cool things you can do with HTML 5 ". I even did that presentation 3 times within a week: OUG Ireland had the premiere, then OUG Norway and OGH APEX Day as the last one of the week. I've planned the same - or similar - presentation for the upcomig Collaborate and OUG Bulgaria conferences. As the most stuff I present is demo (the slide deck is just 5 pages), people frequently ask whether I could write blogpost on one of the subjects. So why not create a sequence of 5 posts....that should make sense. So this is that first of five posts. I hope, not promise, to finish it within a week or two... Cool thing 1 - Input Types With HTML5, you can use both new Input Types as well as additional Attributes. New Input Types are URL, email, number, search and more - see http://www.w3schools.com for a complete list. The definition is very straightforward. In your HTML, replace type="text" with type="email...

Create a PDF document containing dynamic images

For a current project we had the requirement to publish a more or less "glossy" PDF document containing all information about a certain object. One of the bits of information was...an image. The first trial we used the APEX_WEB_SERVICE.BLOB2CLOBBASE64 function to convert a Blob to clob with base64 encoding. In the RTF Template (used in Word with the BI Publisher plugin) you can reference it using this code : <fo:instream-foreign-object content-type="image/jpg"> <xsl:value-of select=".//PHOTO"/> </fo:instream-foreign-object> (where PHOTO is the alias of the clob column). This works....until you're using a slightly bigger picture than a tiny thumbnail. In that case you hit the 32K limit per report column. Although Marc Sewtz (from the APEX Development Team) sort of "promised" to lift this limit in his blogpost of Jun 13 2008 (!) ( http://marcsewtz.blogspot.com/2008/06/one-question-about-pdf-printing-feature.h...

Create a calendar item returning week numbers

When you use the built-in jQuery UI datepicker in your APEX page, you choose from a number of different format masks...but something with "week" is not one of them. And guess what I needed for recent project... But, the good news is, you can (rather easy) use the jQuery framework to tweak the result that's returned from the datepicker. Just create a Dynamic Action that fires on load of the page, and add these line of Javascript: //Show the week number as the first column $( ".datepicker" ).datepicker( "option", "showWeek", true ); //Set Monday as the first day of the week $( ".datepicker" ).datepicker( "option", "firstDay", 1 ); //Return yyyy-ww instead of the actual date $(".datepicker").datepicker("option", "onSelect", function(value, date) { var week=$.datepicker.iso8601Week ( new Date(date.selectedYear, ...

Wouldn't you like to talk to your APEX app?

Of course you are familiar with Martin Giffy D'Souza's blog talkapex.com (if you're not, check it out - it's really worthwhile). But wouldn't it be nice to not only talk about APEX, but also to APEX? The only thing you need is a recent version of Chrome (11 or up) and a microphone. And then...just by entering "x-webkit-speech" to the HTML Form Element Attributes of your input item, you have speech-enabled your application! All "speech enabled" items will get a little mic at the end. When you click on it, you can say what you like. Oh yeah..and it works for number and date fields as well! One remark : Whatever you enter will go through Google's voice recognition ... so Big Brother is listening in on you! Try it out yourself on : http://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=HTML5:SPEAK