OOW09 - Dashboards in APEX

One of the presentations I did at OOW09 was Impress Your Clients with Interactive Dashboards in Oracle Application Express.


The session was booked in the Franciscan A and B room of the Hilton Hotel. So the room was pretty big (around 200 people I think) as two rooms were put together. I like to do interactive presentations, but in such a room e.g. there were two project (one at every side of the room) that is not that easy.

In this presentation I first explained which charting capabilities you get out-of-the-box with APEX, followed by how you can transform these charts into nicer ones. If you really want to impress your clients, Interactive Dashboards are the way to go. Basically a dashboards is one big chart which consist out of different views who have all an own chart.


Having only one swf and one data feed makes it faster than when you would create three separate charts. Anychart 5 provides a nice API to generate these dashboards.

You have different possibilities to feed the chart with data, one of them is creating an Application Process that generates the XML for the dashboard. e.g.


If you want to add Interactivity to your chart, you will need to use JavaScript.

In the presentation I covered all steps in detail. At OOW the presentation got recorded as well so when they release the audio streams, you can hear it there too. I'm also giving this presentation again at UKOUG.

You find the example I explained in the presentation here.

In APEX 4.0 the creation of dashboards will become easier as there will be a wizard in. So far I didn't see a demo of that yet, so I'm not sure how and what features they will include.

At the end of my presentation I also showed a preview of the new chart engine Anychart is working on, called Stock Charts. They are not released yet, but I'm working with them to make the integration with APEX easy. I'm really exited about these new charts! If you need financial charts or charts that are based on dates, these new charts rock!