Skip to main content

Oracle APEX Cookbook [Second Edition] - Book Review

By
Recently the second edition of the APEX Cookbook has seen the light. As I haven’t read the first edition - I know, shame on me - I can’t exactly point out what the differences are, but that doesn’t really matter anyway. I guess no one will buy both versions anyway…

The book follows a different approach than most of the tech books I read (and wrote): Every issue is attacked with a recipe, existing of these steps:
1. Getting ready : Buy the groceries, get the pots and pans; or in APEX terms, do the necessary preparation like create a page or download a JavaScript file.
2. How to do it … : A step-by-step walk through to create the solution.
3. How it works … : A, usually short, explanation of the new or remarkable things you’ve just done when following the steps in the previous paragraph.

So if you don’t like this approach, you can skip te book - and the rest of the review as well. In my opinion, it might work when you’re looking to solve a specific problem - like including Google Maps in your application - but it doesn’t quite read as a novel. There’s no building up in complexity or an increase of tension in the book. It makes it somewhat “dry”…

But, as I said, if you’re looking for a step-by-step approaches of a lot of totally different problems: this is your book of choice! It’s written well, the steps are easy to follow and the code samples are all downloadable.
One thing that’s really stands out because it isn’t covered in a lot of books (if at all), is Websheets. There’s a complete chapter in this one covering all necessary information. There are also chapters on plugins and mobile, but of course these can’t compete with the whole books that are written on these subjects. But if you just want to get to first base, it’s excellent.

In general the book is aimed at beginner to intermediate developers. And even (more) experienced ones might find something useful, like a different approach to a problem, in this book.

So a four star rating f(out of five) rom my side !
Link to publisher's site
Link to Amazon
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to create neatly formatted Excel documents using PL/SQL?

By
If there is a requirement to produce output from an application into Excel, you would probably create a CSV (Comma Separated File) with the data and start Excel to show the data - at least that's what I did...until now. The drawback of this solution is that you could only produce data and no nice layout. But Excel is also capable of opening HTML-files and using this you could create Excel files with data and magnificent layout! Let me give an example: 1. Create a procedure to show the data in formatted in an HTML table. CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE display_emp_list IS v_emp_count NUMBER(5); v_empno NUMBER(8); v_ename VARCHAR2(50); v_job emp.job%TYPE; v_sal emp.sal%TYPE; v_bg_color VARCHAR2(10) := ''; CURSOR c_emp IS SELECT empno, initcap(ename), job, sal FROM emp ORDER BY ename; BEGIN SELECT COUNT(*) INTO v_emp_count FROM emp; owa_util.mime_header('application/ms-excel', FALSE); htp.p('Content...
21 comments
Read more

Refresh selected row(s) in an Interactive Grid

By
In my previous post I blogged about pushing changed rows from the dabatase into an Interactive Grid . The use case I'll cover right here is probably more common - and therefore more useful! Until we had the IG, we showed the data in a report (Interactive or Classic). Changes to the data where made by popping up a form page, making changes, saving and refreshing the report upon closing the dialog. Or by clicking an icon / button / link in your report that makes some changes to the data (like changing a status) and ... refresh the report.  That all works fine, but the downsides are: The whole dataset is returned from the server to the client - again and again. And if your pagination size is large, that does lead to more and more network traffic, more interpretation by the browser and more waiting time for the end user. The "current record" might be out of focus after the refresh, especially by larger pagination sizes, as the first rows will be shown. Or (even wors...
Post a Comment
Read more

APEX ReadOnly Pages - The easy way

By
If your Oracle APEX Application requires different types of access - full access or readonly - for different types of users, you can specify a Read Only Condition on Page level (or Region, Item, Button, etc.).  You can set an Authorization Scheme on Application level, so it'll be applied to all pages. So if you have an Authorization Scheme named 'User Can Access Page' defined by a PL/SQL function like this: return apex_authorization.user_can_access_page ( p_app_id  => :APP_ID , p_page_id => :APP_PAGE_ID , p_user    => :APP_USER );  then you can code all the logic in the database using the APEX Repository, your own tables or a combination to define whether a user has access to that page or not. But alas it is not possible to define something similar Application wide for a Read Only condition. You can specify an Authorization Scheme 'User has Read Only Access' using a similar signature as the one above and use that on each and e...
Post a Comment
Read more