Monday, October 16, 2017

APEX Office Print 3.1 released - support for Docker

Last week we release APEX Office Print (AOP) 3.1, our best release ever :)

AOP was already the easiest and most fully integrated printing and exporting solution for Oracle APEX, but with every new release we allow you to customise the way you use AOP a bit more and add more advanced functionalities.


As more and more bigger companies are using AOP, we focussed in this release more on enterprise features, for example, native HTTPS support, end-to-end and customisable debugging, a new queuing system for large amounts of prints and overall performance enhancements and general improvements.
You can read more about this release in our release history.

One other addition I want to highlight is the ability to run AOP in a Docker configuration.
The Docker image is available for our Gold and Enterprise license.

Docker is the world’s leading software container platform. If this concept is new for you, you can read more at What is Docker?



In the previous days Martin Giffy D'Souza blogged about How to Setup Oracle DB 12.2 Docker Container and Docker Oracle and APEX and Roel Hartman talked about Dockerize your APEX development environment. Those are some excellent posts how to get started with Docker in an Oracle Database and APEX context.

The most important reason for us to make an APEX Office Print docker image available was to ease the installation of multiple AOP instances even more and give the possibility to scale AOP in an enterprise way.

Here's a video how you are up and running with our AOP docker image in less than a minute:



You also find the detailed steps in the AOP documentation.

Juergen Schuster and Martin Giffy D'Souza did a podcast with me end of August, where I talk a bit about AOP and our development too.

If you are not yet on APEX Office Print 3.1, go and download the latest version, even when you are not enterprise, it's worthwhile the upgrade. We updated our AOP Sample Application with some new examples too.


Happy printing and exporting from Oracle APEX with AOP :)

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Talking about APEX Reporting and AOP @ Montreal Oracle Dev Day 2017

For those in Montreal and the surrounding area I encourage you to come out to the Montreal Oracle Dev Day on October 25th (8:30-4:30 at Centre for Sustainable Development).

Here’s a summary agenda of the presentations with the full agenda here:

  • Session 1: Oracle speaker (TBA)
  • Session 2: Francis Mignault: Cloudy with a chance of Oracle APEX
  • Session 3: Martin D’Souza: Open Source PL/SQL Utility Tools for Oracle
  • Session 4: Dimitri Gielis: APEX Reporting tips & tricks
Aside from the presentations you will have plenty of opportunity to network and share your Oracle development experiences. All speakers will be available all day so feel free to bring your APEX questions!

You can register now online.

As I'm not that much in this part of the world it would be great to meet in person. I would love to hear your thoughts on APEX Office Print (AOP) too.  If you have any questions, feedback or just want to talk how to use AOP in your environment, don't hesitate to come up to me. I'm more than happy to talk to you :)

Monday, October 09, 2017

JavaScript, Node.js, JET and APEX day, 7-NOV-2017, Belgium

With great pleasure I can announce we have a special APEX Meetup in Belgium on Tuesday, November 7, 2017.


Dan McGhan is our special guest and will present on different technologies that will enrich your life as an Oracle APEX Developer too.

Unlike our other APEX Meetups, we decided to do a full day event, with food and drinks :) The event is sponsored by APEX R&D, iAdvise, ODTUG and Oracle.

Agenda:
• 8.30 am - 9 am: welcome coffee and registration
• 9 am - 10 am: Setup help for those that couldn't do it before (VM with Oracle & Node.js - optional)
• 10 am -11 am: Intro to JavaScript for PL/SQL and APEX Developers (language mechanics and DOM basics)
• 11 am -12 pm: Intermediate JavaScript for PL/SQL and APEX Developers (Ajax, promises, etc.)
• 12 pm - 1 pm: Lunch
• 1 pm - 2 pm: Intro to Node.js
• 2 pm - 3 pm: RESTful APIs with Node.js
• Coffee Break
• 3.30 pm - 4.30 pm: Intro to Oracle JET
• 4.30 pm - 5.30 pm: Using JET and Node.js with APEX
• Closing Drink

We have a capacity of 75 people, so if you didn't register yet, you find the link here.

Friday, October 06, 2017

Choosing the right template and print to PDF from your Oracle APEX application

This post is part of a series of posts: From idea to app or how I do an Oracle APEX project anno 2017

To motivate players to exercise more, I thought it would be a good idea to give the players a diploma (certificate) when they complete the multiplication table. They will be able to download or print this certificate if they have a specific score. I designed it that we have one official diploma of mtable.online, but there's also the ability so teachers or people at home can print their own certificate in the template or colours they want.

Creating the diploma

Creating a certificate in Microsoft Office is not that hard, in fact online you find many certificate templates you can just download. Most are in Word or Powerpoint format.



In our multiplication table project we have the concept of teams. One or more players can be part of one or more teams. A team could be, for example, a class and the students are the players within that team. I want the team manager be able to upload a template for the certificate (diploma) of the team.

How integrating those certificates in Oracle Application Express (APEX)?

With APEX Office Print, this becomes very easy!


APEX Office Print (AOP) is a print server for Oracle Application Express (APEX) which allows you to define your template in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, HTML or Markdown and merges it with your data in the Oracle database. As output you can select PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, HTML or Markdown. APEX Office Print comes with an APEX Plug-in and PL/SQL API that makes it very easy to select the template and the data in any Oracle APEX application. AOP is also smart and understands Oracle APEX meta-data, so for example printing one or more Interactive Reports or Grids to Excel or PDF is done in a breeze. Till date, APEX Office Print (AOP) is the most integrated, easiest and flexible printing and data exporting solution for Oracle Application Express (APEX).
Full disclosure, my company APEX R&D is the maker of AOP, so I might be a bit biased, but you can check this youtube video where different APEX printing solutions are discussed.

Installation of the AOP plugin

When you go to the APEX Office Print website, you can download the cloud or on-premise version and try it out for 100 days. You just have to click sign up, provide an email go to Downloads and click the Cloud package.


 Extract the zip file that was downloaded and locate the db folder and plugin folder.



Import the APEX Plug-in by going into your APEX app, to Shared Components, Plug-ins, hit the import button and choose the dynamic_action_plugin_be_apexrnd_aop_da_51.sql file. Depending the version of APEX, you might need to choose the _50.sql file (in case of APEX 5.0). Follow the wizard to import the plug-in.



The plug-in calls a package, so there's one more step to do in order to make the plug-in work. Go to SQL Workshop > SQL Scripts and hit the Upload button and select the file aop_db_pkg.sql from the db folder.



Next, click on the Run button to run the script, which will install the AOP_API3_PKG PL/SQL package.

That's it - you successfully installed the AOP plug-in and are now ready to use it in your application.

Note: in the above example we installed the Dynamic Action plug-in. AOP also comes with a process type plugin, in case you prefer a process over a dynamic action.


Calling the AOP plugin from your page

Create a new dynamic action, for example Click on a button and as Action select the APEX Office Print (AOP) Plug-in:



The plug-in is very flexible and has many options, yet it's so easy to use. You first tell the plugin where your template is; in Static Application Files (Shared Components), in a table (define your SQL), a url, the filesystem, ... you just select where and tell it which one.

Next you have to tell which data you want to use, you can define SQL, PL/SQL, URL or even the static id of the region. AOP is so smart it will understand if you put the static id of an Interactive Report or Grid, a Classic Report or even a JET or other chart. Behind the scenes AOP is reading the meta-data, so it will use whatever is behind that region as source. This is one of the most liked features by our customers and something no other printing solution offers.



The plug-in has build-in help and examples, so it's more easy to know how to use the plugin.

You can define some other settings (which items to submit in session state, some special report settings etc.) and finally the output you want; PDF, Word, Excel, you name it.

Print the diploma

When you go to mtable.online, you can view the highscores for all players, or the highscores within a team.



Based on some rules you might be able to print a diploma. The logic which defines if you are allowed to get a diploma I wrapped in a view:


Now the interesting thing is that we can define the selection of the template dynamically in the AOP plugin. So, I've written some PL/SQL code that returns the correct template. If a team is selected, it will use the template of that team, if there is not a team, or if looking at all players, it will use the default template. As described in the first paragraph, the owner of the team can define their own template, they don't need to contact us (the developers) anymore. They just create their template in Word, Excel or Powerpoint and upload it.

From the very start when developing AOP, this was a main goal - we wanted the business users be able to create their own template. As developers we just provide the data, how the data is displayed is defined by the business people. With other printing solutions, such as XSL-FO, iReport, etc. I had to spend hours and hours redefining the template, but with AOP, as a developer, my job is done the moment I write my query :)

Back to the diploma in mtable.online; as default the template I used was a Powerpoint I downloaded from the certificate templates site. The only thing I changed was adding the substitution variables that AOP would understand: {player_name}, {mi_ss}, {play_date} (those are the columns in my query - see further)


 For my team, I went with a Word Template:


 And my plug-in looks like this:


Whenever the diploma link is clicked in the report, the AOP Dynamic Actions kicks in and generates the PDF, based on the template from the team (Word) or the default (Powerpoint). That's it :)

APEX Office Print is even more used in the Multiplication Table project; namely when you go to the  details of an exercise, which are shown in an Interactive Grid, AOP exports this Interactive Grid to our own Excel template. I'll do a dedicated post on that as there're more interesting steps to talk about with adding buttons and custom dynamic actions to an Interactive Grid.

If you didn't try APEX Office Print 3.0 yet, you can sign up for a trial for free. In a few days we ar also releasing AOP 3.1, our best version ever :)