Skip to main content

Kscope Monday

By
The Monday started off with the general session. The most awaited announcement was: Where will Kscope have it's residence in 2015? The answer can be found on www.kscope15.com (in short: in an awesome resort in Florida).
After that, the selection begins ... which session should I attend... I picked two interesting sessions about the APEX Listener / Oracle Rest Data Service. This product is growing fast in functionality and will get more important in the Oracle infrastructure soon!
My favorite session of the day was the one from John Scott, called "Removing the boring from testing". A maybe slightly misleading title, as he was covering utterly cool "headless browsers". Apart from NodeJs, which is a headless server, you can also have an headless browser: a browser without a screen output. Using these tools you can programmatically - using JavaScript - call webpages and examine the result. So using this technique you can write test scripts - in an easy and familiar language - that can run without a browser. But it seems they can do way more than that. So it's time to check out and play around with SlimerJS, TrifleJS, PhantomJS and / or  CasperJS!
Later the traditional APEX Open Mic Night was a blast - as usual. The two hours where easily filled with 5-minute-no-Powerpoint-only-demo presentations. I think we could had gone on for one or two hours more ...
Another successful day in the books!
Labels:

Comments

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