Goodbye apexblogs.info

http://www.apexblogs.info was a place I visited daily. A couple of days ago this domain was moved to http://www.odtug.com/apex. I am not sure I understand why but it doesn't matter. The only thing is that from the usability perspective this is now at least two steps back.

The current layout of the page is displaying a couple of logos, advertisements and some general information and the content is not in the focus - 75% of the page is not showing that, what you would actually expect. You need to scroll down to find the content and you need to scroll a lot. There are all together three scrollable regions including the page and if you don't watch you will easily loose the orientation.

Now, the question to ODTUG people would be if this is going to change in the near future. Hopefully there are plans to improve the usability of this popular resource. Otherwise the whole action doesn't make a lot of sense.

APEX Reporting on Comment Columns

This function may help you if you need to report on columns with a lot of text. It will get rid of the carriage return and will help not to break your reports imported into Excel:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION x_rep (p_string IN VARCHAR2)
   RETURN VARCHAR2
IS
   v_string   VARCHAR2 (4000);
BEGIN
   v_string :=
      REPLACE (TRANSLATE (p_string, 'x' || CHR (10) || CHR (13), 'x'),
               ';',
               '/'
              );
   RETURN v_string;
EXCEPTION
   WHEN OTHERS
   THEN
      RETURN NULL;
END x_rep;
/

My Demo Application

The link to My Demo Application on apex.oracle.com has been changed from

http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=31517:1

to

https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=31517:1

While trying to open the old link you will receive a funny message: