Skip to main content

UKOUG 2014 - A special edition

Although I’ve attended the UKOUG conferences since 2008, this year’s edition was somewhat special to me. Based on the attendee reviews of last year’s UKOUG, I was elected as “Best Overseas Speaker”. And for me that’s quite an honour and of course a recognition for years of work - and practice ;-)
And with a title comes a plaque - it’ll get a special place on my bookshelf. 

I didn’t just get all the way to Liverpool to collect my award. I also did three presentations - from my point of view it was only 2.5, but I have to round up according to Brendan Tierney…
The first one I did was “Ten Tiny Things” about a couple of the less known new features of APEX 5. And I showed something even one of the APEX Development Team members didn’t know ;-) . The second one was together with Brendan (that’s why I usually count this one only as .5) about the things you can do with the Oracle Data Miner and Oracle Text features in combination with APEX. We both thought it went very well and we had some very positive feedback.
The last one - and even the last one of the conference - was the same presentation that won that prize last year about creating hybrid APEX applications. Although I have done this one quite some times, I still like doing it.
Apart from my bow presentations I attended some other ones of course. Especially the ones about NodeJS - one from John Scott and one from Alex Nuijten - got my attention. And of course the presentations of the APEX Development Team about APEX 5: You see some new stuff every time they show it. And getting more and more eager to get my hands on it !
Alas I had to miss some of the sessions, because a couple of rooms were so tiny, they could only hold like 20 people or so. So they “sold out” in minutes. Too bad - luckily that doesn’t happen in Birmingham (where the conference will be held again next year).
And apart from the sessions, it again was an excellent opportunity to hang out with all the old and new friends. Really enjoyed it again. Hope to see you all back in Birmingham next year!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

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...

Refresh selected row(s) in an Interactive Grid

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...

APEX ReadOnly Pages - The easy way

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...