Thursday, July 27, 2006

APEX 2.2 in production

As of yesterday, Oracle Application Express 2.2 is in production!

You can download it from the APEX OTN site here. You can see APEX 2.2 working here.

Although it's only an increase in release after the "." there're some great new features!

Although I like all the new features, this is my top 3:

1. Copy a Page from Another Application
You can now copy a page from one application into another. During the copy process, you can also copy referenced shared components or change the mappings to shared components in the target application.

2. Timestamp datatype support
In release 2.2, you can build forms and calendars on tables that have columns of type TIMESTAMP.

3. Component-level Export
You can now export shared components or components of a page. You can use this new feature to backup a component before editing or to create an export that functions as a patch to another Oracle Application Express instance.
at

10 comments:

  1. Roel7/27/2006 10:51 AM

    I don't know the reason, but it's not available for XE..as you can see in the installation file (apexins.sql):
    ...
    if nvl(t_edition,'x') = 'XE' then dbms_output.put_line('- Application Express cannot be installed in Express Edition. -');
    ...

    Anybody knows why??

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  2. Anonymous7/27/2006 11:06 AM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  3. Dimitri Gielis7/27/2006 11:13 AM

    Roel,

    As I understood from the APEX Dev Team; The version of APEX for XE is a "lightweight" of the real product, concerning "development" as some database features, used by APEX, aren't available for XE. BUT the APEX version of XE has some more features for monitoring and administrating the database.

    Do others have other insights?

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  4. Anonymous7/27/2006 1:49 PM

    Funnily enough I blogged just yesterday about how XE relates to Application Express.

    http://jes.blogs.shellprompt.net/2006/07/26/oracle-xe-application-express-and-the-great-divide/

    The updates for XE and Application Express are (at least for now) being handled as separate events (i.e. an update to Application Express is not released on the same day as an update to XE).

    Remember that XE is essentially a free version of the database that includes a preinstalled version of Application Express, so in a way you could liken it to the fact that Oracle is not releasing 10gR3 just because there was an update to Application Express (that's how I see it anyway).

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  5. Roel7/27/2006 3:18 PM

    I just removed the anti-XE lines in the upgrade script and ran it (just curious what might happen). The script ended without errors. After copying the image files, my old applications are available in ApEx 2.2 - the only difference is that there is a workspace created for every application! I didn't explore all new (and old features) to check if everything still works, but didn't encouter anything strange so far....

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  6. Dimitri Gielis7/27/2006 4:09 PM

    This is an interesting behaviour of APEX ;-)

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  7. Anonymous7/27/2006 7:53 PM

    Roel: For the installation it asks for a "images" parameter. What did you use? "/i/" ???

    Thanks.

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  8. Roel7/28/2006 3:14 PM

    Martin,
    I did use /i/.

    See my blog at http://www.bloggingaboutoracle.org/ for more experiences using Apex on XE.

    Gr. Roel

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  9. Anonymous8/25/2006 4:39 PM

    @roel:
    I cannot find out where to copy the "images"-directory from the installation-zip into the XE-tree. I used /i/ as recommended but now I am standing in the dark. Do you have a hint ? Thanks !
    Andree

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  10. Roel9/04/2006 2:41 PM

    Andree,

    Maybe this link will shine a little light in your darkness:
    http://daust.blogspot.com/2006/03/where-are-images-of-application.html

    HTH
    Roel

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