Roels Blog

I was really looking forward to fly out last Saturday to Las Vegas for my first visit to Collaborate. But the Icelandic vulcano with the unpronounceable name (something like " Eiwjhfdjaajfkjjsirsuj "), threw soot in the food - which is a direct translation of a Dutch saying, the corresponding English saying would be something like: " spoil-sported it ". So both my presentations are canceled, sorry for those who had planned to attend! The good thing is, I got a 100% refund of both flights and hotel from Expedia, with one single phone call of a few minutes on Sunday. A great service, that I didn't expect, so I was happily surprised by that! So at least I got cashes for ashes, bucks for dust .... I really hope the air will be clean before the next big conference, ODTUG Kaleidoscope in Washington, and hope to see you all there!

  I just received an email that the Call for Papers for the UKOUG Conference Series Technology & E-Business Suite 2010 has opened. The submission deadline is 2nd August, so you still have some time. The event itself is from 28th November to 1st Devember in Birmingham. From my experience I can only say that this is the best European Oracle event around, so if you want to be part of it: Just do it! Submit your abstracts here:  http://techandebs.ukoug.org/ .

Almost a year ago I blogged about a solution how to create those nice striping in an Interactive Report . That solution is based on using the onLoad method of an image that you use in the IR for linking to a Form. The downside of that solution is that it doesn't 'support' sorting and filtering. After applying a sort of a filter the coloring is all gone. Also - in some browsers - the order in which the rows (or images) are loaded is not the same order as you see on the screen, resulting in a more or less randomized striping... But recently I found out about the l_LastFunction attribute of a report. That function is called after all worksheet (report) AJAX calls. So if we define a function that does the striping for just the odd rows in the worksheet after all calls - like sorting, filtering - are done, the striping just keeps working! The code uses jQuery and is just this: $(function(){   function altColor(){    $(".apexir_WORKSHEET_DATA tr:odd").addClass(...

Yesterday the OGh (Dutch Oracle User Group) organized a full day about APEX. There was a very good turn-up of about 150 attendees and about 10 sessions to choose from. A couple of attendees already blogged about it like Rob , Michel and Dimitri . I agree what they already have written so I won't repeat it. There also was a rumor - that I heard of before, so it might be true - that APEX 4.0 is planned to be released just before/after or even during ODTUG ... So around the end of June we will experience if the source of the rumor is a reliable source or not...

On March 30 the OGh (Oracle Usergroup Holland) organizes its first APEX Day. One day packed with success stories from companies and presentations. This meeting offers a lot of in depth presentations, interesting content and meetings with colleagues. Besides user experience, this is another day that will stress the developments of APEX 4.0. Although the program has not been finalized, it is already announced that Dimitri Gielis (Apex Evangelists), Patrick Wolf (Oracle), Art Melssen (CIBER) and myself will fill a presentation slot. I guess most presentations will be in Dutch (not Patrick's). At this moment already 57 people signed up...and there is room for only 120. So you better be quick. You can register here .

For all you APEX Plugin developers: There is already an operational APEX Plugin Directory available at http://www.apex-plugin.com/ . You can add your own Plugins there and view and download the ones your co-APEX developers came up with. Looks pretty slick, with just one drawback: It is not built in APEX (at this moment). Oracle also has one under construction at http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/application_express/html/plugins.html .

Better late than never... I am also happily playing around with APEX 4.0 and busy creating some PlugIns. The first one is rather simple (once you get the hang of it). It can show you a Google Wave by just entering the Wave ID (ok, and a width and height for your convenience). If you have a Google Wave account you can see the results and download the PlugIn on : http://tryapexnow.com/apex/f?p=PLUGINS:GOOGLEWAVE . More to come ... : as you can see in the Wave, there are lots of good ideas on PlugIns!!

Just like the rest of the 'APEX World' I immediately jumped on the 4.0-bandwagon and signed up for a workspace on http://tryapexnow.com . Although I have seen a lot of the 4.0 stuff this year, but having the thing in your own hands is something completely different! IMHO this version (even without Websheets!) is the major APEX release ever. There are so many new, enhanced or restyled features, it just blows you away on first sight. I almost feel a newbie again... I hope to find the time to dive into some new features the next couple of days (or probably weeks..).

Only in a hosted early adopters environment. See Patricks teaser at http://inside-oracle-apex.com .

Last Friday I received a mail from IOUG Collaborate telling me my abstracts were accepted. It will be my first Collaborate attendance (and my first visit to Las Vegas), so I am very honored by that! I will do the next two presentations there: It's great to integrate: Integrating Oracle Forms within Oracle Application Express. Since the release of version 3.2, the Oracle Forms migration toolkit is part of Oracle Application Express. This toolkit is not a silver bullet, so for complex Forms, labor-intensive adjustments in APEX will be necessary. To preserve investments in Oracle Forms and to prevent large re-investments in APEX, it is an advantage if you fully integrate existing Oracle Forms within Oracle Application Express. In this session you will learn how to integrate existing Oracle Forms in Oracle Application Express pages and how you can make these two technologies communicate with each other. Tales from a Parallel Universe: Using 11gR2’s Edition Based Redefinitions (in APEX...

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting the UKOUG Technology & EBS Conference. The 3 days of presentations and social networking started already on Sunday evening with the ACE dinner - very well organized by Mark and Debra. Thai food combined with good company is proven to be an excellent combination! Amongst all the tracks I picked the ones on APEX 4.0, Forms-to-APEX conversions and some DBA / CBO / SQL presentations. APEX 4.0 One of the greatest (of many) interesting features of APEX 4.0 is - without any doubt - the Plug-In functionality. Anyone can define snippets of code that can be used in a declarative way in your application. By defining a Dynamic Action based on a Plug-In, you can probably do anything - only limited by your imagination! Plug-Ins are defined per application, but can be published and subscribed, like you can do with Templates. Oracle is planning to have a Plug-In repository at apex.oracle.com (or samplecode.oracle.com) containing the Plug-In code itself or ...

For a current project the customer needed an Interactive Report with update functionality - in an Excel like style. Since we couldn't wait for APEX 4.0, we decided to build it in the current version. The requirement is that the user can change some fields in the report (the Expenses, budget and estimates) for every year of the project life cycle and then the funding should be calculated according a defined formula (to financially smooth things out). So I created a nice view with a formula to show the budget en estimate and the calculate the funding and created an Interactive Report on top of it. The editable fields are created using the apex_item.text function with the p_attributes parameter set to: 'onclick=editField(<type>,<key1>,<key2>) readonly class="editField"' . Once the user clicks on the field, the field is presented in a different style, made editable and with two little icons next to it. After making the change, the user hits the green...

As you all know by now APEX 4.0 will have some new functionality regarding the creation of Custom Item Types and Custom Region Types. These types will be called "Plug-Ins". The idea is that there will be a public App Store like library where you can up- and download plug-ins. A snippet from the Oracle Open World APEX 4.0 presentation: Easy way to enhance the existing built-in functionality of Oracle APEX with new item types, region types, dynamic actions, etc. Developers use in similar fashion to native widgets Wizard support and declarative setting of attributes Included in APEX application export By providing this plug-in system in APEX, we want to engage the APEX community to create a rich ecosystem around Oracle APEX. The APEX Development Team can’t possibly incorporate all the widgets that developers would like to utilize. By using plug-ins developers can readily incorporate additional item / region types to enhance the functionality, appearance and user friendliness of ...

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...

That is soooo simple, click here http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=41715:APEXWAVE .

It is somewhat experimental, but here it is...and you probably can't see it if you don't have a Wave account. There should be a " Bloggy " robot to facilitate postings from within Wave with just one click, but that doesn't seem to work. Instead I used Embeddy (embeddy@appspot.com) to give me some javascript with the Wave ID. I copied that and pasted it in the HTML of the Blogger Template. The DIV is just added to thi post. You can only have either one blogpost with a Wave or need a line of javascript for each Wave you need to publish. So a working version of Bloggy might be handy...

Using APEX Interactive Reports you can let the user decide which columns to show or hide in a report. But even then, reports with over 20 columns are still being used. So I tried to come up with a solution where you can hide less important (detail) column information and still reveal that information with minimal effort - like a mouse-over event. In this tiny example the list of employees of a department pops up when the user moves his mouse over the little question mark icon. By adding some HTML and Javascript in the select statement (I know, that is not a " best practice "...but if you've got a better idea, please drop a comment) and some CSS you can use this technique - even for more complex "detail" reports! The select statement used in this example is: select dept.deptno , dname , loc , ' onmouseover="javascript:$(''.overlay'').hide();$x_Toggle('''||dept.DEPTNO||''')">'|| ' ...

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...

Yesterday evening guys from Quest presented their latest cool new tools at one of our company locations. They started with Foglight , a tool for Application Management. Using that tool you can see on one page the status of the applications that are running, where users experience some problems (based on thresholds), the number of users affected and where in the application stack the problem occurs. With a few clicks you can drill down to the actual origin of the problem. Foglight supports a number of application types (like Java, .Net, Siebel, SAP), different types of access (o.a. Apache, Citrix, Rich Clients), multiple infrastructures (Windows, Solaris, HP/UX, VMWare) and different databases (SQL Server and - of course - Oracle). Foglight uses so called "Quest Collectors" on the web-, application- and databaseservers to sample data. That data is collected in the Foglight Management Server . Apart from that you can use an Experience Monitor and Viewer as a network sniffer. Q...

Developers and architects attend Kaleidoscope to find out how to use the new technologies to make their jobs easier. Your expertise and experience are key to our participants getting their questions answered. Click here to submit your abstract to speak at the developer event of the year. ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. is the conference for Oracle developers and architects. Kaleidoscope has it all - more than 150 technical sessions, day-long symposia, hands-on training, chats with participants and speakers, and even a community service project. So far the "offical" advertisement. My personal opinion is that Kaleidscope is the place to be for Oracle Developers. Just because it is at a 'somewhat' smaller scale than - for instance - Oracle Open World (last year there where around 700 attendees), you can speak to whoever is there (and 'everyone' is!). Also the content of the presentations is very good. But don...