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

Filtering in the APEX Interactive Grid

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Stop using validations for checking constraints !

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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