Today United Codes changes the way you look at your Oracle APEX apps

This is a day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years.

Every once in awhile, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything ...

... and United Codes has been very fortunate. It's been able to introduce a few of these into the Oracle APEX world.

In 2015, we introduced APEX Office Print; it didn't just change the way we export and print data; it changed the entire mindset on how to present data.

In 2019, we introduced APEX Media Extension; it didn't just replace Oracle Intermedia; it changed the way we deal with media in APEX.

Well, today, we are introducing three revolutionary products for Oracle APEX:

1. an automated documentation generation tool
2. a monitoring tool
3. a quality assurance tool

An automated documentation generation tool, a monitoring tool, and a quality assurance tool ... these are not three separate products, this is one tool, and we are calling it ... APE - APEX Project Eye.

You might recognize the above ... this is how Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. For me, one of the best presentations I've seen. Of course, APE is not the new iPhone, but I strongly believe that APE will change the way we deal with Oracle APEX applications. Let me tell you why...


Automated Documentation Generation

Nobody likes to write documentation. In most cases, documentation is written at the end of a project and because someone forces you to do it. It takes days to write and to decide what to include and what to leave out. It's not always clear why you even write the documentation. Maybe it's because you want to remind yourself of some functionality. In most cases, however, you write it to help other people understand the project. The day it's written, it's already outdated, as things change. Documentation is hardly ever being maintained or even able to be located when needed. In short, it's just a pain.

When you follow a few good practices during development of your Oracle APEX app, APE will do the documentation part for you! You will have always easy to find and up-to-date documentation. The person looking at the documentation can decide what they want to see and what they want to dive deeper into.

You can define a project in APE and specify which applications belong to this project. You can specify some background of the project, but the real power is that APE reads the Oracle APEX meta-data. APE also allows you to change the help and comments directly inside the APE interface. If you follow the APE guidelines on how to write comments for your database objects and procedures and packages, you are golden. APE reads all that info too and presents in an easily digestible format.

And in case you want to export the documentation, you can do it with one click as we have integrated APEX Office Print (AOP) with it. Select the different sections you want in the document, chose the format (HTML, Markdown, PDF), and hit the print button. 

Monitoring

If I asked you, how many workspaces and applications do you have in your Oracle APEX instance? And from those applications, how many are currently in use, and who is using them? Are things running smooth or are your users receiving many errors? Would you know?

I didn't.  And almost all companies I'm called into have only a rough idea of what apps are running. In one company that I visited a few months ago, they asked me to document all the apps that were running and who was using them... the people who managed their Oracle APEX apps were replaced a few times, and they just had no idea anymore.

When you create an Oracle APEX app today, you can specify a feature called Activity Reporting, which gives you a decent overview of that specific application. But I always wanted more than that.

I wanted a holistic overview of my Oracle APEX instance. Show me in the entire instance -  what is going on, which workspaces and applications are still being used, how much, and by who. But also let me drill-down into a specific app and get detailed insight into which pages are being used the most, where errors are happening, and how the performance is. I'm not only interested to see numbers, but I want to know that today things are running better than yesterday or the week before. APE will show you exactly that, in a clean and easy to use interface.

This dashboard gave us so much insight into our own environment. It showed me not only do I have to fix some bugs in applications I wrote many years ago, but also that I might need to look at some queries as performance isn't always that good and probably is slowing down my database at times. It also showed me which applications are important and being used on a daily basis and by whom.

And that company who asked me to document their Oracle APEX environment? I just installed APE and the management now has an always up-to-date view of their environment.


Quality Assurance

You start the project by creating a data model. Next, you create the Oracle APEX app, show the customer, make changes in the data model, and the APEX app and you iterate like this a few times. At least this is how the start of a typical project looks like for me.  For other companies it might look a bit different, perhaps a bunch of consultants comes in, which work on an APEX app, do some handover, and leave.

The hardest part is keeping an eye on the relationship between the database objects and your APEX components. Which database objects are still being used? Which APEX pages are still being used? And oh boy... we are two years later and I have to make a change in this table, what's gonna break?

Another part I always found challenging is to know if how you built the application and intended it to be used, if that is also how people actually use the app. It was only by people showing me their workflow that I could effectively give them tips on how to better use the app... or actually, improve the app so it was more obvious for the end-user what was expected.

So what I understand under quality assurance tool; is a tool that helps you to code well, that gives you a clear view of the database objects, the APEX components, the relationship between them, and visibility in the usage of the app, so you have all you need to do an amazing job.

APE will not only give you insight into all the components but regardless of how you look at it, you get the picture! Either you start with the Entity-Relationship diagram and see the APEX components linked to it. Or you start with the Page Flow of your APEX app and drill back to the ERD. And finally APE has a visual that has never been done before, we call it the Session Flow. It's an amazing visual representation of how people actually use your app and how people navigate from one page to the other.

All of these views have given me insights into my own Oracle APEX apps, which I've never had before. We got insight into how people use our portals, we saw we had database objects which were not used at all and when we had to change a page, we knew what the impact would be on other pages linked to that page. It's an awesome feeling when you truly master your app.

APE - Your Second Screen

It's really cool to have an app with the above, but as developers, we are constantly in Page Designer when we create Oracle APEX apps, right? Wouldn't it be nice to have APE on a second screen and while you develop, APE gives you more information, like the database object dependencies of that page?

We thought that too ;) Click on the Eye in the Tree View and be amazed :)

The first time I saw the Live Insight feature, I couldn't stop smiling... you see instant database object dependencies, you see relationships of objects, links from other pages, it's all there. Seeing it is believing it!

Note: for some people, quality assurance is following naming conventions and good practices. And I love for example to use the APEX Advisor, as it does some checks for you. In a future release of APE, we also want to cover that area of QA and our plans are to include an advisor you can customize with your own checks.


And there's one more thing ...

We decided to make APE completely FREE for personal use! Head over to https://www.apexprojecteye.com and download APE today!

Let the EYE be with you! ~ Yoda

ORDS: The database user for the connection pool named |apex|rt|, is not authorized to proxy to the schema

When configuring some Oracle REST web services through Oracle APEX, I got confused, so I thought to quickly write down, so I don't forget for the future.

Although I use many ORDS web services in several schemas, for a new schema I got following error: "The database user for the connection pool named |apex|rt|, is not authorized to proxy to the schema named ."

I was confused, as I enabled the schema to be REST enabled.

It was only once I gave following permissions it worked:

alter user {USER} grant connect through APEX_REST_PUBLIC_USER;

There you go, it might help you too :)

A new look, a new name...

Last Thursday we gave a new look to our products APEX Office Print (AOP) and APEX Media Extension (AME). Not only did they get a new logo, but the whole website and portal were also put in a more modern, minimalistic look.

At the same time, we announced that our company APEX R&D would from now on, sail under the flags of United Codes.

With United Codes we want to bring all of our products and services together under this new brand.

In the coming weeks, we will announce two more products, which I can't wait to show you!
In our heart, we love the Oracle Database and Oracle Application Express (APEX), so both products will be in this area.

United Codes

This blog post isn't just to say we have a new logo and brand, but I want to share why I'm thrilled about our new brand "United Codes".

When I look at my life, there has always been a constant, I love to bring ideas into reality with code.

It can be something small, like when I was a teenager and I was in love with a girl instead of writing a card, I coded a program that would show her name and hearts. She never saw it, as it turns out she wasn't interested, but it gave me so much pleasure when I got the code to work.

Bringing ideas to life alone is nice, but doing it together with others is even nicer. Together you can do much more.

I remember a day at Oracle Open World (OOW) where there was a coding challenge. Initially, I wasn't going to participate, but the night before the deadline, Martin D'Souza and I said; "lets code together for one night and see where we end up". It wasn't the fact that we won which gave a lot of pleasure, it was working together to bring the idea we had to life.

Our AOP product is not any different. I had this idea to more easily get template-based reports out of Oracle APEX. I started on a prototype and got it to work, but it only became really awesome when more people started to work on it, especially Sunil Tandan. Not only did we work together on something, but it also became a shared dream.

In my consulting career in many cases the best results happened when there was a mixed team from business, coders, and people who just were passionate about bringing an idea to life.

The name UNITED CODES describes someone who is able to master the "code of the problem" aka the „input-code“ as well as the "code of the target" aka the „output-code“, and unites them by knowing the "code itself" which is the key concept and solution.

The logo is in principle the union of two opposites, as for example body and spirit find their union and center in the soul. At the same time, it can be read as a narrative from left to right and thus tells the story. As a whole, especially through its center, it can actually be seen as a heart, which is also the center in man and the seat of the soul, of enthusiasm and devotion. At the same time - at the level of the spirit - the center is an eye that unites opposites in its ability to see. Furthermore, the sign can also be seen more than twice as the letter "C", the initial letter of the word "code" denoting the "united codes".

There are many more codes than those of the programming languages used in computer science. Each area has its own code and each problem has to reveal its own code first before it can be recoded into a solution. Experts for the input codes may be mathematicians, engineers, system theorists, cyberneticists, game theorists, or physicists. Experts for output codes are computer scientists and full-stack developers as well as certain specialists for implementing the code.

2030

What excites you for 2030? Did you already think about that?

What excites me is to bring ideas to life. In the short run I want to focus on Oracle Database and Oracle APEX, as in my view, it's one of the best tools to bring data and ideas to life. Oracle's mission statement resonates really well with me: "Our mission is to help people see data in new ways, discover insights, unlock endless possibilities."

When you saw my VR presentation which I did two years ago, I already expressed my dream. I really believe the low-code development is at the start, I envisage we can build apps, just like Tom Cruise used his hands in Minority Report to get insight into his data:



During my research in this area, I believe the technology isn't advanced enough to go mainstream.
Although SpaceX already used it to design rockets, for coding inside a browser the technology wasn't good enough yet. This would be one example of how to bring ideas to life faster, but there are many other ways to achieve that.

I really love a quote from the movie Ratatouille which I slightly changed: 
"Not everyone can become a great coder, but a great coder can come from anywhere"

Many people have great ideas but lack the ability to bring it to life. With United Codes we can accelerate bringing ideas to life.

I want to finish this post by thanking the entire team at APEX R&D for all their efforts the last years to bring us where we are today. I couldn't wish for a better team and I look forward to starting this United Codes journey with them.

Configuring AOP as Print Server in Oracle APEX 20.1

One of the new features in Oracle Application Express (APEX) 20.1 is the integration with APEX Office Print (AOP).

In this blog post, I want to cover what this integration means and how you can set up and use AOP in APEX 20.1.

Background printing/exporting in Oracle APEX

Oracle APEX 3.0 introduced the ability to export a report region to PDF - essentially, printing a report. This is defined declaratively and is available for all report regions. You can view and print reports with page headings and footers that repeat on each page and content that properly conforms to various page sizes. To accomplish this, report data is transformed into PDF format using an externally defined report server. In the early days, this external report server was Oracle BI Publisher or an External Apache FOP server. Later, when ORDS came out, an FOP server was included as an option.

I believe that the External Apache FOP wasn't used much, as it was too complex to set up and use. BI Publisher was used by people who were able to pay for the (huge) license or who already had it in their company. In my experience, ORDS was the most used Print Server. But, in the ORDS 18.4 release notes, it was announced that the built-in FOP server would be deprecated and with ORDS 19.4, FOP was taken out completely.

This meant people needed to stay on an earlier version of ORDS or use something else...

About APEX Office Print (AOP)

APEX Office Print (AOP) has been around for more than 5 years and makes exporting and printing from Oracle APEX easy and affordable. Based on templates you create in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, HTML, and Text, AOP merges data coming from APEX regions, data from the database, or even external data with templates in the defined output format for example PDF or any of the template formats. In the last years, AOP has gained a lot of popularity and has become the go-to printing engine for Oracle APEX projects.

Last year Oracle announced they would build an integration with APEX Office Print directly in APEX and with APEX 20.1 this has now been made available. In this first iteration, AOP serves as a replacement for the FOP server, in future Oracle APEX versions, more AOP integration is planned.


Configuring AOP in Oracle APEX 20.1

To configure AOP as your Print Server, log in to the INTERNAL workspace and go to Instance Settings:

Click on Report Printing and select APEX Office Print as the Print Server:

Fill in the host address where the AOP Server is running. AOP can run in the AOP Cloud as configured above, or the AOP Server can run locally (on-premises). You can get a FREE Cloud subscription on apexofficeprint.com or you can download the on-premises version. Make sure you are running AOP 20.1 or above, and for the Script, you enter /apex/

That's it! In APEX 20.1 you configure the Print Server on the instance level. In APEX 20.2 it's planned for you to be able to override these settings on the workspace level, so in case you have different AOP Servers or Cloud accounts for different projects, you can define them there.

Using AOP in Oracle APEX 20.1

To see the native integration of AOP in action, you can go to any Classic Report or Interactive Report and hit the Print or Download to PDF link.

The Print link in a Classic Report:

The output will look something like this:

You can customize the output in the Print Attributes of the Region:

You have the same feature when clicking Actions > Download > PDF in an Interactive Report

This is the basic integration of AOP in Oracle APEX, which mimics what ORDS, BI Publisher or an External FOP Server provided.

APEX Office Print can actually do much more than the above. AOP can print one or more Interactive Reports exactly as you see it on the screen, including highlights, breaks, filters etc. It can also combine IRs with IGs and Classic Reports and even charts all in a custom template you provide.

If you want this functionality, you still need to use the AOP Plug-in or AOP PL/SQL API, just like you did before APEX 20.1. You can download that from the APEX Office Print website.

I strongly advise you to also install the AOP Sample App, as it showcases all the features AOP gained in the last 5 years. On every page, you can see how the example is being built and which template has been used.

What does the future bring?

As with any future plans, things are not yet set in stone, so safe harbor applies here... but the plans are that APEX Office Print (AOP) will be further integrated with Oracle Application Express (APEX).
In APEX 20.1 you can download to PDF, but as AOP can also export to Word and Excel, it makes sense to give you this functionality too. Further on AOP comes with many other features, we will see how we can make those available to you in an even easier way :)

In another blog post, I will talk about the difference between native PDF printing which was introduced in APEX 20.1 and the AOP integration.

Happy exporting and printing!