Wiederholung APEX 5.0 Best Practices

Wegen der großen Nachfrage veranstalten wir jetzt einen Zusatztermin für den APEX 5.0 Best Practice Kurs am 21.Nov - 23. Nov. 2016.

Anmeldung zum Kurs

APEX UT - Display Image in a List

If using universal theme, we can switch from a classic navigation bar to a list and display it where usually a navigation bar is displayes - right top of the page. The problem with the list is that it will escape any html code in the list name. If we want to display an image, we will get the html code. To go arround that problem, we can use the "user defined attributes" for the lists and put the image into the "Badge Value". This list will then display the image almost as expected. We will need to apply additional css to make the background of the "Badge Value" transparent and to adjust the font to the rest of the navigation bar list:

.t-Button--navBar .t-Button-badge {background-color: transparent !important; font-weight: 400 !important; font-size: 1.2rem !important}

This is then how it appears:

Here, we can add the "Badge Value":

Finaly, here we can change our navigation bar from classic to list or oposite:

APEX Modify UT Breadcrumb

While creating pages with the new UT I noticed that the breadcrumb breakes after the second level and this takes too much space. This example shows how to go arround that problem with just a couple of css styling lines.

And this is how it looks like after applying the css.

5.1 EA

It is incredibly quiet around APEX release 5.1. Just a couple of days ago I was talking to Dietmar and we were asking ourselves when is APEX 5.1 going to be released because of our training schedule for the rest of the year. On Tuesday this week Markus visited the EA site and this is what he found there. Many exciting things to appear in the next versions. Read the details and you will get an idea about what is comming.

New APEX Blog

Markus Hohloch is a new blogger is the growing APEX community. He is a part of our APEX Experts team and he is blogging mainly in german. He has a couple of interesting postings. Have a look.

My Presentation at APEX Connect 2016

On 28th of April I will be presenting at APEX Connect in Berlin. The topic is Integration of APEX with HERE Maps. If you are interested to see how you can integrate APEX with Maps (HERE or Google or some other) please join the presentation. The best thing is that this integration ist done using APEX Plugins only. I will try to show as many functionalities as possible including Routing, Tracing, Positioning and a combination of all the features together.

My Demo Application

If you experience a problem accessing My Demo Application (old and new version) at apex.oracle.com, that means there is a reason for that. One of the users deleted all the applications in my workspace and installed some of his own. I don't think this was intended but it is still a lot of work and I am trying to geta all the important stuff back online. After that I will need to rethink the way of accessing the workspace. It happened for the second time within the last four months.

APEX 5 - Opening and Closing Modal Window - Part Two

In this blog post from 2015 I explained how to open a modal window from an item and pass the values back, display a sucess message, etc. This page also contains an item plugin to make it easier to do the whole stuff and avoid hardcoding. I have never published this plugin. Hopefully this functionality is going to be a standard part of 5.1. Now, I was asked to make this working with a file browse item as well. I extended that example and created a new one showing how to do that with changing and clicking on a file browse item. You can see this example here. If you have an account for my workspace, you can even download the plugin and make it working in your environment. Enjoy.

Change Item Position using jQuery

See this example on how to change the item position. In APEX you can position the buttons after the action bar in an interactive report. However, you can't put the items there. Using jQuery this is easy to achieve.

React on Tab Change

See this example on how to react on tab change in APEX 5. The problem is to determine the right selector to trigger the corresponding dynamic action. Thanks Christian Rokitta for your help.

APEX Dashboard Competition

APEX Dashboard Competition initiated by Tobias Arnhold is now online. If you want to compete against your colleagues all you need to do is to create a nice looking dashboard based on the prepared set of data, crate a packaged application and send it to the jury. You can apply here: Submit your application and win some nice prices. Hurry up. The closing is on Friday the 1st of April 2016.

Remove Blanks from Formated Date Column

This small example is showing how powerful jQuery is and how easy it is to use it in APEX. In this case, I needed to correct the oracle formatting, which adds blanks to the name of the day prior to comma. Probably oracle RPAD's the day names to the longest (Wednesday). Those are showing in APEX as one blank - see the left column. The only good way to go around that annoying side effect is to use jquery and basically one line of code.

APEX Feature Request

Just created a new feature request for APEX at https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=55447:19:::NO:19:P19_ID:50481528500531591330407043519019274105 … Extend Interactive Report API - Get IR Query. The feature request is abut the following:

"This API should deliver a couple of different SQL statements for an interactive report. There are several possible requirements I can think of:

1. IR query including visible columns and filter values - actual SQL for the user session,
2. IR query including all columns and the original SQL,
3. get column names of an IR with or without column alias,...

Having this SQL we should be able to run it as EXECUTE IMMEDIATE, without having to replace any binds.

This feature could be included in the actions menu and available as a plugin for dynamic actions - new dynamic action feature (action)."

Please, feel free to go there and vote for it.

Select all Checkboxes in IR - APEX 5

If <input type="checkbox" onclick="$f_CheckFirstColumn(this)"> doesn't work for you in APEX 5 Interactive Reports then you will need to disable Fixed Headings (standard). Fixed headings splits the report into two tables and the function won't work.

Oracle Live SQL

Oracle Live SQL is a great source for learning SQL and PL/SQL. It has a lot of good examples and interactive educational tutorials. The best thing is, it runs on APEX ;) Add this site to your bookmarks.

Oracle Database Developer Choice Awards (2nd)

I was just looking at the voting results for ORDS and APEX. In the ORDS category Dietmar Aust is leading and in the category APEX it is Morten Braten. So far so good. These men deserve the award for sure - they did a lot for the community and the most of us are using (or have used) their solutions. Think of Morten's PL/SQL Utility Library or Dietmar's PDF Printing...

The only thing I have a problem with is the absolutely microscopic number of votes. The most votes in the category ORDS has Dietmar - 134. In APEX it is 98 votes for Morten. Even Jari Lane who is very well known in the APEX community and has helped numerous people with his solutions has received all together 103 votes - obviously almost the half of it as down-voitng. To my point of view this is incredible. But if I think back and do a comparison with my own experience then this is actually normal. In the last seven years I have received more than 9.000 emails from the community asking either for access to my workspace, my Demo Application or asking for an APEX solution of some kind. As a result of that I have created almost 4.000 accounts and answered 95% of those emails. But all together, maybe 50 receivers responded saying thank you.

Conclusion:

Shame on us. We are lazy and cynic. We are constantly talking about how big the APEX community and how strong it is. Maybe, because there are a few people out there like Dietmar, Jari, Jürgen Schuster, Morten and few others. The rest seem to be there only when they need something.

Oracle Database Developer Choice Awards

Don't forget to vote for the expert of your choice at https://community.oracle.com/community/database/awards. There are a lot of good men there deserving your voice for their activities in the community and for their selfless engagement.

Count Selected Rows

This small example is showing hot to make sure at least one row in your tabular form has been selected prior to proceeding:

https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=93000:806

Switch Panes in Page Designer

This is definitely worth of mentioning. Go here and download this plugin for Firefox or Chrome. You will like it. It switches the panes in the Page Designer so you can much easier access the properties of the selected elements. Congrats Filip. This is a cool feature. Thanks.

Expert Oracle Application Express 2nd Edition

Expert Oracle Application Express 2nd Edition seems to be available at Apress. Buy this book and support the charity project in memory of Carl Backstrom and Scott Spadafore (previous members of the APEX Team). Please note that all funds will be donated to the families of these two great men.