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 could work for one of the competitors. but that wouldn't make a big change, wouldn't it? I might find a job at a "regular" company - not being some kind of IT integration company. That could be interesting, but I might find it somewhat boring after a few years. So what's another option? Starting a company for myself - or become independent is!

I talked with a some people that already made that decision earlier and they made me even more enthusiastic as I already was. I also talked to Dimitri and John from APEX Evangelists and there we found a match. APEX Evangelists was looking for a way to grow and saw The Netherlands as an interesting opportunity. So after some talks, emails, etc. we agreed I will start a Dutch branch of APEX Evangelists! And that's official as of today...

I am looking forward to expand the AE business in The Netherlands and work closely together with John and Dimitri. So, starting today, you can contact me at roel<at>apex-evangelists<dot>com...

Comments

Filtering in the APEX Interactive Grid

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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

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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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