Wednesday, June 16, 2010

APEX 4.0 Websheets - Behind the scenes

Tomorrow during my presentation about Team Collaboration in APEX 4.0, I'll talk about Websheets. While I was going over my presentation again I came accross two things I thought are interesting.

The first; if you want to search in SQL Workshop for the Websheets table, you want to type APEX$ as they all start with that. However if you type APEX$ in the search it doesn't find the tables. To find the tables you have to escape the $ sign, so your search becomes "APEX\$", then SQL Workshop finds the tables.

Secondly, when you have a closer look at the columns, it's commenly known there are 50 date, 50 numbers and 50 varchar2 columns. But I didn't notice before, there is also a Geocode column in the definition of the table. The last weeks I'm involved in a project that uses Geocodes, so I find it interesting to see there's already something in Websheets for that...
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4 comments:

  1. Anonymous6/16/2010 9:34 PM

    The geocode column is just a varchar

    It is not a Spatial column, is that what you thought it was?

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  2. Dimitri Gielis6/16/2010 9:41 PM

    Sure I saw that... I just found it interesting there's a geocode column with that name. I think it has more to do with language/territory than with spatial data, but it could be a first link to any spatial related things in the future...

    And yes Spatial is what I'm doing at the moment and it would be nice to have that kind of support in Websheets.

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  3. Bill Ferguson7/14/2010 3:55 PM

    Hi Dimitri -
    Yes, having some built-in support for Spatial would be a big plus. Trying to get it all figured out correctly and manually adding the capabilities into your apps can be quite a pain at times, though I've finally got it all figured out with my app and Google Earth. I can create KML files of selected data points, and let the user plot those on Google Earth, or let the user draw a polygon around an area in Google Earth, import the polygon back into the database, and then re-query the database for whatever falls within the boundaries of that polygon (along with any other search criteria). The KML files can also be imported into ARC fairly easily (with the X Tools add-on), and since my organization is basically an ARC shop, this helps provide data to the ARC users, since shapefiles are such a pain.

    So, anything Oracle can do to simplify the process will have a huge benefit for those of us struggling with Spatial.

    Bill Ferguson

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  4. Dimitri Gielis7/14/2010 7:02 PM

    Hi Bill,

    I had to pleasure to combine APEX with Spatial recently too and it's a nice technology.
    I'm not sure how far they will integrate Spatial into APEX directly, but without too much hassle it's already possible and with the plugins you can easily extend APEX 4.

    Dimitri

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