Roels Blog

As I promised earlier I should write a review of the Oracle Application Express Forms Converter book by Douwe Pieter van den Bos. I finally found the time to work it through...it doesn't take that much time, because it is "just" 150 pages thick (or thin). The book contains 8 chapters, in which the reader is guided through an Forms2APEX conversion project from start to finish. It starts of with " Understanding your Project " (1), wherein understanding the reasons for conversion as well as the functionality of the Forms application is stressed as important, because these will influence the way you'll solve things in the APEX application. One or more examples should have been useful here. The next chapter, " Preparing your Forms Conversion " (2), covers the creation of XML files from the source files. BTW, not only Forms, also "Reports" are - briefly - touched (and can be converted as well). Also different ways of creating a target database...

In previous blog posts (like this , this and this one) I explained how you can integrate (or embed) Oracle Forms within an APEX Page. But yesterday I stumbled upon this question on the Oracle APEX Forum. There someone was looking for a solution how to access an APEX Page from an Oracle Form - so exactly the other way round. And, after some trial-and-error I came up with this solution: 1. Copy the basejpi.htm (or whatever html file you're using in the formsweb.cfg) on your application server to (something like) forms2apex-jpi.htm and reference that in your formsweb.cfg. 2. Edit the forms2apex-jpi.htm and add an IFRAME tag just before the closing BODY tag: <IFRAME src="http://localhost:7778/pls/apex/f?p=104" style="width:800px;height:450px;visibility:hidden" name="APEX" id="APEX" scrolling="auto" marginwidth="1" marginheight="1" frameborder="1...

When I opened my mail after a week in San Francisco I discovered that my article was published in the latest release of WeLoveIT (a free magazine for Oracle & Java users and developers). If you can read Dutch (or want to try), you can read it either here or here .

The new issue of Oracle Scene (the official UKOUG Magazine) out. I am very proud that one of the articles is written by ... me! It is even on the cover page! For all the folks out there who don't have a subscription, you can read my article here . Let me know what you think of it!

On his blog , Grant started a discussion about the reasons - and especially managing the expectations - of converting Forms to APEX. The interesting thing is that also Joel Kallman (from the APEX Development team) joined the conversation, therefore making it a sort of Oracle internal discussion platform... That you can use both technologies together proves this picture (the region on the upper left is an Oracle Form). I will present at ODTUG on the " how-to's ".... ( another shameless plug ).

I just received the latest version of OGH Visie - the magazine of the Dutch Oracle Usergroup. As always there are a lot of interesting articles, but this one in particular attracted my attention: "APEX 3.2 now with Oracle Forms to APEX conversion..." . Guess who wrote it... ;-) For all non subscribers: The magazine is available for download from the OGH website . Those who can't read Dutch have to wait for an upcoming release of Oracle Scene - just today I submitted the English version to the editor. Hope they'll publish it also!