Roels Blog

Still recovering from a light jet lag, it is time to look back at another excellent ODTUG event. Although I planned to blog about it on a daily basis, the social/networking activities prevented that... (a.k.a. "I rather drink a beer with some friends and have a good chat, that write another blog post" ). So here's a (rather) long wrap up of this fantastic event! Sunday June 21: APEX Symposium The symposium, with around 200 attendees, started at 8:00 AM (attending ODTUG is really hard work!). The day started with a sort of keynote by Joel Kallman , followed by 6 presentations of real world APEX applications and was finished off with a Panel discussion. Some highlights of the day: Joel did an excellent presentation called Application Express: Ahead of the Curve . He explained that APEX is still ahead of it's time and therefore will still gain (even) more interest in the market. Especially because of the high speed development, you can create all kinds of applications wi...

To my suprise I received an e-mail from the Oracle Open World Content Team that my abstract "It's Great to Integrate: Combining Oracle Forms and Oracle Application Express" has been accepted - even though it is still "in the Mix", open for voting (currently 65 votes at the 9th position). Maybe a 'spy' attended my session at ODTUG? Nevertheless, I proudly accepted the invitation and hope to see you all at the next Oracle event in San Francisco!

Today I drove down from SFO to Monterey via the scenic coastal route. At first I had some problems with my car: it is the first time I drive a car with an automatic gearbox, so I have to keep remembering to leave my left foot just where it is.... In Monterey I first went to the Bay Aquarium. It was quite busy there, but once you've seen it, you know why. I especially liked the jellyfish and the octopus. Just beautiful! At the aquarium I already met "the Insum guys": Francis and Patrick. Back at the hotel I met more old acquaintances, visiting ODTUG again is just like a high school reunion... After dinner and some beers, the jetlag is really kicking in...my computer tells me it's 6 AM and I feel tired... Looking forward to the sessions of tomorrow!

As I wrote in a previous post my colleague Rutger was working on an Anycharts Conversion Package to automagically convert the standard charts in APEX from version 3 to version 4. That's finished now. You can download the latest (beta) release on http://apexacp.blogspot.com ! Give it a try!!

After a long long journey I finally made it to my hotel next to San Francisco Airport. I can see the planes as they come and go, but luckily can't hear them. The first leg of my trip, from Amsterdam to Cincinnatti, wasn't that bad: I had a complete row of three chairs for myself! Delta provided everyone with earplugs and blindfolds, so I stretched my legs and took some naps (still don't know if it is a good idea to take as much sleep as you can on a flight or to try to stay awake as long as you can, in order to survive a none hour time lap). The offerings on the entertainment system where good enough and even the food was ok. I had less then two hours to change planes in Cincinnatti, and - with the experiences of the Sam Francisco and Houston Immigration lines - I wasn't certain that that would be enough. To my big suprise there was no line at all (I don't want to call three people in fron of me a 'line')! I even had to wait at the luggage belt before my su...

As from today the Vote-a-Session for Oracle Open World 2009 is open. The organization received over 3,500 (!) abstracts. 350 of theses submissions are granted 'direct access' to the main OOW program and around 150 were selected for the public Vote-a-Session on Oracle Mix...including mine (so I already made it to the top-500). But now I need your vote! So please login on Oracle Mix (you can easily create an account if you don't have one) and vote for My Session: "It's great to integrate: Combining Oracle Forms and Oracle Application Express" . The full list of proposals is available on https://mix.oracle.com/oow/proposals. Last year there were a lot of APEX related sessions to vote for, this year I can only find around five. Alert: You have to vote for at least 3 sessions for your votes to count! Hope to see you all at OOW....

Last Friday I received an email from the Oracle ACE Program Office that I am accepted for the Oracle ACE Award! At this moment I am not on the ACE Directory and also my OTN Forum Profile doesn't show the Ace of Spades yet, but that should be fixed in a few days or so (I am more than thrilled to swap my two 'Guru medals' for one spade thing). The award itself seems a little dangerous because I had to sign a document to release Oracle from all liability for any injuries caused by that award. Seems like a rather sharp thing... According to the ACE Directory I am the 215th worldwide, 13th in The Netherlands, and, after Andrew and Piet , the third within Logica. A special thanks to David and John who nominated me. I guess I owe them a few drinks during the upcoming ODTUG event...

In APEX, using an 'old-fashioned' report, you can create alternating row colors out of the box. But when you want to use the Interactive Report (IR) features, you can't do that anymore. But some people still have that need, according to this question on the Forum . The main problem is that you can filter and re-order the resultset on the fly, so you can't define the coloring using the onload method of the page, because that's only fired once. But when you have a Link Column in your report you can use the onload event of the image in that link : <img src="#IMAGE_PREFIX#edit.gif" alt="" onLoad="Alternate(this);"> And define in your Page HTML Header: You can see the colorful result here: http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=ROEL:ALTERROW

Recently I encountered a question on the OTN Forum about " How to Highlight a Current Row in an Interactive Report ". For a regular report that kind of highlighting is a built-in functionality in the template, but an IR doesn't have a (editable) template (could be a nice enhancement for a future version though!). But you can override the styles used by an IR, by adding some STYLE tags in the Page HTML Header. First take a look at the on-line demo . You can click the [Edit] button to see the highlighting in action. So how do we achieve that: First we need to add a function call to the [Edit] link/button in the IR: Add "onclick=highLight(this);" to the Link Attributes property of the Link Column. This click calls a "highLight" function, defined in the Page HTML Header: function highLight( pThis ){ $('td').removeClass('current'); $(pThis).parent().parent().children().addClass('current') ; var empno = $(pThis).parent().next()...

Just like previous years, AMIS organizes a Sneak Preview of the ODTUG presentations by the Dutch speaking 'crowd' - for those who can not make it to Monterey next month (budget- or otherwise). This little ODTUG is on Monday June 15th, from 16:30 to .. the end. For an overview of the sessions and a subscription link, click here . The attendees will get more than available at ODTUG, because even Dimitri will do a presentation!

Last week I received an e-mail from the editor of Oracle Scene - the magazine of the UK Oracle User Group - that my article on Forms to APEX Conversion will be published in the next issue (due for publication in July). So, right after my first article , the second one will be published! And indeed, I am very excited about that!

As a follow up on my previous post I created a more elaborate example of the Anycharts 4 features. Take a look on this site and play around with the settings. Just click on the Horizontal/Vertical, 2D/3D settings or Bar Shapes: The chart will refresh automagically. You can easily achieve the same results - replacing your AnyCharts 3 with AnyCharts 4 - in your current APEX application (and - quote from Dimitri - nicer charts = more money ;-) ). Just edit the Chart Region Source as described in the previous post and cut-and-past the XML from the demo site into your Custom XML and you're done. The good news is, is that my colleague Rutger is working on a package that even generates that AnyCharts 4 XML, using the definitions in the APEX Repository! So you even don't have to get your hands dirty editing Custom XML... I expect that he will publish that piece of work ' soon ' (i.e. in the next two weeks), so keep a close watch on his blog !

With the current APEX version you can create nice looking Charts using Anycharts 3. The charts you create with Interactive Reports use Anycharts 4. These charts look better than the regular ones, and we - my colleague Rutger and I - started to investigate the options for enhancing the regular charts. Of course we could wait for APEX 4.0 or go for Anycharts 5, using the Anychart Integration Kit , but we love a quick and more cost neutral (as in ' free ') solution... So let's go: Create a simple chart using the "SELECT NULL LINK, ENAME LABEL, SAL VALUE FROM EMP ORDER BY ENAME" query. Now make let's make some changes in the generated Region Source to use Anychart 4: Change <param name="movie" value="#IMAGE_PREFIX#flashchart/#CHART_TYPE#.swf?XMLFile=#HOST#apex_util.flash?p=&APP_ID.:&FLOW_PAGE_ID.:&APP_SESSION.:FLOW_FLASH_CHART_R#REGION_ID#"> to <param name="movie" value="#IMAGE_PREFIX#flashchart/swf/AnyChar...

It's still a long time to go, but the Call for Papers for the next UKOUG conference (30/11 - 2/12 in Birmingham) just opened. You can submit an abstract before June 5 (look here ). I have been there twice and I can recommend this conference!

Recently there were two threads on the APEX OTN Forum regarding the implementation of an Amazon-style star rating mechanism ( this thread and this thread ). Using this jQuery plug-in that implementation is not so difficult. The first step (of course you've installed jQuery) is to install the JavaScript and CSS of the plug-in. To create a demo I added two columns to the DEMO_PRODUCT_INFO table : RATING and VOTES. The second step is to create a PL/SQL function and use that in your select statement to show the current rating: create or replace function GET_STARS ( pID in NUMBER , pRating in NUMBER ) return VARCHAR2 is l_retval varchar2(2000) :=''; BEGIN FOR i in 1..5 LOOP IF i = pRating THEN l_retval := l_retval ||'<input class="star" id="'||pID||'" name="star'||pID||'" value="'||i||'" checked="checked" type="radio">'; ELSE l_retval := l_retval ||'<input class="sta...

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 ).

Yesterday (March 31), the Oracle Benelux User Group held its (almost) annual conference in Antwerp. Apart from the three central keynotes, the around 600 attendees (my guess) could pick one of the 10 concurrent sessions - in three timeslots. The conference was mainly 'Apps' driven: most sessions where from an Apps-perspective - so there were only a few interesting sessions from a database / development point of view. José Lazares (Vice President Applications Development and Applications Integration Architecture) did the first keynote. The message I got from it was: more BI dashboards presenting data from different sources (a lot of screen shots with nice graphs). I skipped the first concurrent session, because I had to be on our stand. The second sort of keynote was by Tom Sligting , a Dutch stand-up comedian. He had some very funny jokes, but had a hard time with the sometimes barely-responsive audience. Lonneke & Lucas did a duo presentation on SOA Suite 11g (in fact it...

The above mysterious acronym stands for: Oracle Open World 2009 - Call for Papers. You can be part of the ' greatest show on earth : Submit your papers here . With the risk of reducing my own chances of getting a paper accepted...

Check out the full schedule of ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009 . So many sessions..so little time. And even more frustrating: in every timeslot there are at least three must-see sessions! Luckily I have another couple of months to decide where to go (and what I have to skip). You can view the schedule here . (I have to compete with Scott Spendolini for the APEX crowd...)

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!