Good Blog Bad Blog

Just checked if the http://www.odtug.com/apex is available again and it is. It seems the people there are filtering blogs because I don't see my blog post from yesterday appearing there and I don't understand why. Is that just because I said that the old blog listing was much better? Or this is just another technical problem they have? Am I going to be removed from that blog listing forever if I continue saying things which they may not like?

You shouldn't think this happens only to you

Since several hours I am getting this while trying to access all blogs at http://www.odtug.com/apex. It seems that this list has a lots of problems listing all the relevant APEX blogs. The previous version from Dimitri was so much better and user friendly.

Value Placeholder

Did you know that you can use Value Placeholder in your page items to display hints for the users? This is a quite neat feature you can implement without using different plugins for displaying hints. It will also work with the APEX ampersand substitution strings like

&P1_ITEM.

Here is how it looks like. Be carefull with this. It will work only for the browsers supporting HTML5.

APEX Connect 8th and 9th of June 2015 in Duesseldorf Germany

APEX Connect is the first big APEX event in Germany and will be taking place in Duesseldorf on 8th and 9th of June 2015. You can still apply for a presentation using this link. I will be there with a presentation on APEX Plugins. As far as I know a couple of international guests are expected to be there as well. This event will for sure be interesting and informative so you should think about participating. Düsseldorf is close to Belgium and Holland so I think that we will have quite a lot of visitors from those counties as well. It just comes to my mind that the presentation should be in English. So, you should make sure to book your ticket, hotel and travel in time.

APEX 5.0 New Features - Terminverschiebung

leider müssen wir den Termin für den bei uns gebuchten Kurs "Oracle APEX 5.0: New Features" (Termin: 08/09.12.2014) auf den Februar 2015 (09.02/10.02) aus gegebenem Anlass verschieben.

Wie Sie/Ihr bereits bestimmt erfahren haben, wird sich das Release von Oracle APEX 5.0 etwas verschieben: https://blogs.oracle.com/apexcommunity_deutsch/de/entry/openworld_update_application_express.

Sie können sich hier zum Kurs anmelden.

XML Parsing Error: no element found Location: ...

I am just working on an application which is supposed to be exposed to public users. I created a simple ajax process there which gets a value of an application element and does something based on the value. While calling the on demand process I am getting this error while not authenticated:

XML Parsing Error: no element found Location: moz-nullprincipal:{6492ed13-2b81-4989-938c-7c19121f419a} Line Number 1, Column 1:

After searching for this error in combination with APEX I found my old thread from 2012 which basically wasn't answered:

https://community.oracle.com/thread/2444115?start=0&tstart=0

After investigating what is happening there I noticed that the on demand process I created is set to "must not be public user" in the authorization section. Obviously APEX does that by default for the on demand processes. Running the ajax call would not find the "element" which is the actual process.

Mein APEX Vortrag bei Orbit in Bonn

Am 05.11.2014 halte ich einen Vortrag über Rapid Application Development bei Orbit in Bonn. Dabei wird auch noch mein Freund und Kollege Tobias Arnhold sein. Er wird über die Themen Plugins und Reporting sprechen. Anschließend zeigt Frank Weyher (der ebenso ein guter Kollege und Freund ist :)), wie man APEX mit Office integrieren kann.

Die Themen sind sicherlich interessant und eine Anmeldung lohnt sich sicherlich. Der Link zu der Veranstaltung finden Sie hier.

APEX - Default Branch on Submit

Yesterday I spent two hours on debugging one of my applications and searching for an answer. Of course, the problem was caused by myself. Here is what happened:

I copied a page and deleted the region including buttons and items using the Cascade to Delete Buttons option.

Then I created a form and had there a process on submit to upload files in my table. Everything was working fine except the fact that after the process the page would show up empty having the funny

wwv_flow.accept

message.

Looking at the page I couldn't see anything what would point to the actual problem. The process was there and it was running and the branch was there. Only after a while I looked into the branching and saw there that it was conditional - firing when the deleted button was pressed.

Then it came to my mind that this wasn't the first time I had this problem. I think this is a bug and it has to do with the file browse item. I expected the page to redirect after submit since this feature is there since 4.0. However, it didn't. This issue seems to be fixed in 5.0.

And one more thing to add: It does make sense to create conditional branches but it doesn't make sense to create unconditional ones. The feature of creating unconditional branches to the actual page, where the branch resides, should be removed completely.

You can see it in "action" here

APEX 5.0 New Features Schulung

Unsere nächste Schulung hat APEX 5.0 New Features im Fokus. Diese findet im Dezember am 08. und am 09. in Bensheim statt. Wenn Sie auf diesen Link klicken, können Sie die Details anschauen und sich ggf. anmelden. Dieses Thema is sehr spannend und viele neue Features bzw. Änderungen kommen auf uns zu. Wir denken, dass Dezember der richtige Zeitpunkt dafür ist, damit anzufangen.

Set Focus on Added Row Tabular

This sounds quite simple:

"I would like to set focus on the new added row in my tabular form."

In the following example, you can se how to acomplish that.

Cascading Shuttle - Keep Selected Values

There are probably a several good ways to solve the following problem:

    1. you have a simple select list which cascades a shuttle element
    2. you select something and the shuttle is populated
    3. after that, you pick a value in the shuttle and move it to the rigt side
    4. then you change the select list again
    5. the values you selected in your shuttle are now lost


This example shows how this can be done. This question apears in the APEX Forum from time to time and I decided to provide one simple solution for it.

jQuery - loop through a Tabular Form

This question is one of the frequently asked questions - "How do I loop through a tabular form using a dynamic action?". This example shows how to loop through a tabular form and set the values for each row to what ever you want. Using apex_application.g_fxx array is not an option for onload processes or dynamic actions. It can only be used in an on submit process. Using jQuery in a simple loop it is possible to read / set any of the values in any column. Try it out.

OTN APEX Forum again

The OTN Forum is not available (again). This usefull but constantly changing forum now gives me the following message:

I am not sure why they are using jive for that. Maybe APEX would be a better solution.

OTN APEX Forum Link

Oracle again changed the layout of the forum. For me, the old link didn't work any more. In case you have problems finding it, here is the new link:

https://community.oracle.com/community/database/developer-tools/application_express

If you go to the forum and search for example for "APEX" or "Application Exp", you will see no results. Typing in "Application Ex" will find "Application Express".

Each of the found links will have a funny description saying:

"An error occurred processing your request. If this problem persists, please contact the webmaster or administrator of this site."

:) So, it seems there are now even more bugs than before.

Probably, the intention to change the forum wasn't bad. However, once you manage to open it you will see a lot of information you don't need (or at least not all of the time). The real content is somewhere underneath and needs scrolling like in Facebook (oh, how I hate that site). And the worst thing is that you can see only ten threads per page - if you want to see more then click and scroll again. For those interested in helping others this is making things much more complicated.

One positive thing though. :) My name suddenly appears in the top list of the participants in the forum. The list isn't reduced to the top five but it now shows the top six. Top six is obviously the new top five. ;)

APEX 5.0 - Rejoin Session

This great feature is finaly there. I remember asking for a solution back in 2007. I needed to send emails with application links to my users. If they would receive an email they would click on the link and were supposed to land on a particular page. The problem was that they would already have an open session and they expected the link to go straight to the page without asking for a new login. The solution I found was quite tricky and it stopped working with the version 4.1 because of the changed session handling. APEX 5.0 finaly introduces this option out of the box. You can enable it in the security attributes for:

- Public Sessions only
- All Sessions

You can of course override these settings on the page level, which makes a lot of sense.

APEX 4.2 - Knowhow aus der Praxis

Unser Kurs findet am 26.05.2014 - 28.05.2014 in Bensheim statt. Die Details vom Kurs können hier gefunden werden. Das ist unser letzter Kurs, der sich mit der APEX 4.xx Version befasst. Der nächste Kurs und alle weiteren Kurse werden sich mit der Version 5.xx beschäftigen. Nutzen Sie die Gelegenheit und melden Sie sich an. Unser Gastredner Carsten Czarski wird zwei Themen begleiten:

- Sample Geolocation Showcase
- APEX Mobile

Die Themen sind spannend und wurden grösstenteils überarbeitet und auf die Features von der Version 4.2 angepasst.

OGh APEX Conference

Last week I was presenting at OGh (ORACLE GEBRUIKERSCLUB HOLLAND) APEX World. My topic was "APEX 4.2 Application Deployment and Application Management". I can only recommend this conference to all the APEX users in Europe. This is definitely the biggest APEX conference on our continent. If you don't travel to ODTUG then this is something you shouldn't miss. They have an international track where you can listen to the well known APEX developers and book authors. This time Dan McGhan, Martin Giffy D'Souza, Joel Kallman, Dietmar Aust, Roel Hartman, Peter Raganitsch. For the tracks in Dutch, they are also willing to switch their language to English at any time if there are visitors not understanding Dutch. All together, Dutch people are open minded and I admire their sense for organizing such events - they definitely know how to do it.

APEX 5.0 Page Designer Videos

There is a nice series of videos regarding APEX 5.0 Page Designer on YouTube. You can watch it here. David Peake is showing how the new Page Designer works. It is worth of having look at it and much easier that finding it out yourself. Enjoy.

APEX Plugin Page

I just noticed that http://www.apex-plugin.com is programmed using php and jomla. Shouldn't it use Oracle APEX?

APEX IR Query Plugin

I already posted about the function for getting the IR query here:

http://www.deneskubicek.blogspot.de/2013/05/getting-interactive-report-query.html

Now, I decided to create a dynamic action plugin based on that function. The plugin has been submitted to the plugin directory at http://www.apex-plugin.com/ and should appear there soon. If you want to see how it works and download the code, you can do it here as well: https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=43045:1

Oracle APEX Cookbook : Second Edition

I was asked to review this book and write a couple of words about it. Of course I didn't go through all the 444 pages of the book because I don't have enough time. From what I could read and review, I can say that this book contains a lot of well explained examples for almost all APEX features. So, if you are new to APEX and want to speed up your learning process then this is a good choice. Experienced APEX developers can also use this book as a reference.

APEX 5.0 - New Features - Sub Region - Region Position

One of the first things I checked in APEX 5.0 EA was the region positioning of the sub regions. I was positively surprised to see that I can now position the regions next to each other as well. In earlier versions the only option was underneath. Having this possibility it will be much easier to create complex forms where you need to take care of positioning multiple items in more than one column. At the moment this is doable but somewhat tricky.

APEX 5.0 - early adopter is cool

This is definitely the best APEX version ever. I just tested it and it took less than a couple of minutes to get used to it. You know how hard it is to accept major changes. This time it was easy. The changes made in the builder will for sure increase the productivity although this was never a weakness of APEX. There are of course some things missing (or I just couldn't find them) like how to create a simple form. Some features are still not implemented like workspace user management. Some things remained the same like a wizards for page creation. However, I can confirm that it is worth of requesting a workspace and starting to use it. It is simply cool.

This is how the page builder looks like:

And this is a result of my first test:

And here is the link: https://apexea.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=4000:1

Enjoy.

APEX Training 2014 - Best Practices

Our next training will be held in Bensheim on 26th of May 2014. You can find the details here.

Die Erfolgreiche Trainingserie geht auch in diesem Jahr weiter. Dietmar Aust und ich organisieren ein weiteres Best Practice Training am 26.05.2014 in Bensheim. Diesmal findet das Training auf der Basis von APEX 4.2 statt. Nutzen Sie die Möglichkeit von Experten zu lernen und melden Sie sich an. Einen Link zu der Anmeldeseite finden Sie hier.

Barcode Report

This example seems still to be interesting to some people in the community. The number of requests and questions I am getting regarding it forced me to update it. Now the rendering is using an application process instead of a public procedure - using public procedures in XE is somewhat tricky.