What's wrong with the Oracle Forum?

As you probably noticed, the forums are either:

- not available at all or

- taking a lot of time to load or

- if they ever load, they are not working properly and showing errors if you try to create or update a posting.

If you manage to load those pages, you will notice that there are some new featueres implemented. Some of them are usefull. Like the new text editor (I realy like that one). Some of them are however questionable:

- the new reward system where you can get some points if you provide a helpfull or even a correct answer. The funniest thing is that the asker is supposed to say the answer someone provided is "correct".

- the fonts were changed to 11px which is not readable at all,

- the visited property they implemented are i.m.h.o. unneccessary because of the image showing if the posting was opened before or updated since. It is anoying too. Hard to read because of the grey color on a grey background.

I already asked the people who set it up if they are realy sure this makes sense. They didn't answer. Well, I am probably not the only one who asked.

Despite of the changes made, features I like or those I don't like, the most important thing though is the availability of the forum. And the fact is - it is not available since almost a week. Have they done a test before they upgraded? How did they test it? Did they ask the comunity about the changes? Maybe they should roll it back once again and consider a redisign using ApEx.

Oracle Text in Five Short Steps

Almost every application I create contains a BLOB (file) table for storing files available for a download. In the most of the cases it will store some documentation related to the application - user manuals, howto's and similar stuff. The download functionality is a nice thing but how about searching the content of those files? There are some examples arround showing how to do that in ApEx but in my opinion the most of them are far to complex. I created an example in my Demo Application, showing how to do that in less than five minutes:

http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=31517:76



This example includes the most frequently used functionalities:

1. mixed case search

2. highlighted snippets

3. index synchronization on commit

If you need more, you can always look into the Oracle Text Documentation.

Enjoy.

Form Validation and User Friendly Messages

I am getting this kind of questions quite often:

"I have report with form for modifications. After clicking on the link the form related to this report pops up. Often this is done by at least two users trying to modify one and the same record simultaneously. In such cases the application raises - "ORA-20001: Current version of data in database has changed since initiated update process. Error Unable to process row ....(table name)".

Could you give some advice or give and example how to handle this in a more user friendly manner?"

I created an example in my Demo Application showing how this can be done:

http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=31517:210

which also includes a step by step guideline.



There, you may test the validation by starting a concurrent update process and trying to update the data on the parent page.

Add Rows to a Standard Tabular Form using Item Value

There are many threads regarding this issue in the forum. Many of them without any answer. So, how do you add rows to your standard tabular form based on an item value?
If you follow this example:

http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=31517:209

you will see that you need three small adjustments to the standard process:

1. extend your SQL using UNION_ALL by adding a small SQL selecting NULL's from DUAL followed by CONNECT BY LEVEL <= :P1_ADD_ROWS_ITEM,

2. add a conditional branch, first in the sequence, passing a request ADD to your page

3. do a modification to the standard add rows process to add 0 rows

and there you go. You don't need to write a manual process to get that functionality
applied on your standard tabular form.



Enjoy.

Dynamic Tabular Form

It can happen that you get a requiremen similar to this one:

http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=691046

1. You have an unknow number of tables

2. You don't know the structure of the tables in advance

3. You still need forms for entering and maintaining data

The only solution that comes to my mind are dynamically created tabular forms. Tabular forms have already a bad reputation. Now, if you add the word "dynamical" to it, it will sound even more horrorful.

As I promised in the mentioned thread, I tried to create a working example. This is what I came up with:

http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=31517:195

It took me arround three hours to get that code together. Of course, this can be done much better - using a package and providing some additional functionalities like validations and other item types.

Multiple Cascading Select Lists (again)

This is an issue for many developers. I see a lot of questions and receive a lot of mails on this topic. I thought that demonstrating how to do that with two items would be enough to guess how to do it with more than that, since the approach is the same. However, there is nothing better than a step by step guide to get it working.

You will find the extended example here:

http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=31517:119



My advice, from what I have seen so far debuging the other people examples, is to:

1. be carefull with copy-paste and before you do it, think of replacing the given item , table and procedure names with your own,

2. test your on-demand processes in the SQL workshop first, to see if they run,

3. avoid multiplying your code through copy-paste. This makes it much easier to debug and

4. if you have no experience with a similar solution, try to reduce your scope and do it on a simple example first. Try using emp, dept tables like I do it in my Demo Application.

Enjoy.

Default Sorting of a Report

This was an interesting question:

"My requirement is Report should always display the original sequence (in the same way if I run the report in TOAD or SQL*PLUS, ...) and when I click the column heading then only it should do the actual sorting. Now, as soon as I set the sortable attribute to YES for a column and running the report for the first time... it's doing the sorting based on the that column."

So, how do you do that? Normaly, if you enable sorting on an apex report, it will save the sorting preference per user in an item and will call this preference next time you login.

I used the rownum to display the "original sequence" on initial load of the page and enabled the sorting on that column as well. Putting this column to be the first in the row on columns with enabled sorting and hiding it would do the trick. The second thing I did was to remove the sorting preference on the initial load and keep the rownum ordering as long as the user decides to sort the report.

You can view a working example here:

http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=31517:13