CD APEX 4.0: Verifying imported application

This blog post is part of a series posting "Count Down to APEX 4.0 Public Release" (click on link to view history).

Yesterday we imported our application in APEX 4.0. The import went fine, but we had some errors with the script in Supporting Objects.

So today I looked at the errors and fixed them were appropriate (mostly data issues). I used the SQL Data Workshop in APEX 4.0 to load the data manually. One issue I found was to import blob content. As you can upload your own picture in DG Tournament, this gets stored into a blob column. Also the image for the teams are stored in the database. But SQL Workshop or SQL Developer are not able to generate a script for that, so you will have to use SQL Loader or a custom PL/SQL procedure to get them loaded. I didn't do that yet.


Now that I'm happy with the back end, the first thing I want to try is run the application and see if it works... Click here and see how the DG Tournament application looks like in APEX 4.0.

So not bad at all... but not completely perfect either. E.g. we get a javascript error on the first page. Looking into that error is for another day.

Now I'm going to use a new feature of APEX 4.0: the Advisor. The Advisor will look at my application and tell me what is not correct. Cool he!?

In the navigation bar we click on the Application Utilities icon


We get to a page with a lot of nice utilities. It's not my goal to explain all of them in this blog post, but I'll use one, the Advisor. So we click on the Advisor button (bottom left).

We want to leave the default checks like that and click on the Perform button. As you can see the Advisor will check for Errors, Performance, Security etc.

We'll keep that running for some time. Depending the size of the application it can take seconds or minutes. Finally there are the results... It looks like I've some things to look at!


In APEX 4.0 I'm using the Advisor constantly. Whenever I finish a page I let the Advisor run for that page. Whenever I want to do a release I run the Advisor for the full application.
It would be nice if we could get this Advisor to run every night and get the outcome by mail the next morning. I didn't look yet if there's an API available to do this now, but a few people, including myself, mentioned this at EA1.

Back to the app, now it's time to verify the recommendations of the Advisor and adapt accordingly.

Tomorrow I'll use another exciting feature which you also find in Application Utilities (screenshot on this page)! Anybody wants to do a guess which feature I'll use?