APEX 5.0 UI Training - Looking back and towards the future

This week Dimitri Gielis and I ran a training day about all the new APEX 5.0 UI features. We had a full room with 20 enthusiastic attendees from 4 different countries. We covered some general APEX 5 UI features, the Universal Theme, Responsive Grid layouts, Template Options, Theme Roller, Theme Styles and bringing it all together using some advanced features. See the website for more details.

And - as it was the first time - we received some very valuable feedback in order to make a next run even better. Thanks to all attendees for that!

And for a next run we are thinking about different options:

1. On line (broken down in 3 parts)

2. Another one in The Netherlands or Belgium

3. Somewhere else in Europe (Germany? Scandinavia? UK?)

4. Somewhere else in the world.

Please let us know what you think. Please leave a comment or drop an email with your thoughts. We would really appreciate that.

Comments

Filtering in the APEX Interactive Grid

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apex_application.g_f0x array processing in Oracle 12

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

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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