APEX 4.0 EA2 - Websheets

In APEX 4.0 EA2 the Websheet functionality is enabled. Websheets allow you to share information with others in a very quick, user friendly and secure way.

Let's have a look at an example. If you go to Application Builder in APEX 4.0 there is a new type there called "Websheet Applications".


We create a new Websheet Application and give it a name and possibly some content that will appear on the home page. You can type the content with the WYSIWYG editor (CK Editor) by clicking on the arrow button.


Before it creates the Websheets, the wizard gives a summary page and that is it.
Websheets are even simpler to create than a normal APEX (database) application.

You can compare Websheets with a preconfigured APEX application. A whole Framework is build for you with a lot of features out-of-the-box. You can just use all that.

When you run the Websheet from the App Builder you come into "Websheet-land". As a default Authentication mechanism it uses the Application Express Account. But you can change that by going into the Websheet Properties to Public Access, Single Sign On, LDAP or Custom.


When logged in, you come into the Websheet Framework. As we have Websheet Development Access, we can change the Websheet. In the top menu and on the right hand side you see what you can do. E.g. you can add pages, sections, data grids etc. There's a lot to explore there!


In the different sections of the page you also have Edit links, which allow you to easily change the text, all with a (WYSIWYG) html editor.


I see two big parts of Websheets; sharing information and data. The information is done through using Pages, sections, tags, files etc. just like you do in a Wiki/CMS. But where it outperforms all the typical wiki or content management systems, is with the data part!

One of the killer features of Websheets are the Data Grids. If you go to Data > Data Grids and create a new Data Grid, you have the choice to start from scratch or from Excel/Text with copy/paste. That allows you to create "a table" on the fly which holds your data (actually it's a record in the Websheet repository). This Data Grid look very similar to an Interactive Report (see Actions button), but it allows to do inline editing and a lot more (see Manage button)!

Websheets are too big to discuss in one blog post. There are so many areas which could be covered. There's the wiki part, the data part, the administration (security, dashboards), ...

Maybe one last thing... look at the url of a Websheet (login with end/end)... it doesn't start with f?p... it starts with ws?p ;-)

Preview Oracle APEX 4.0 - Websheets

Oracle Application Express 4.0 will include a lot of nice new features. You can read about these in the statement of direction.

A few months ago I put some screen shots of the Websheets functionality on my blog.

Now I'm happy to show you a video so you can see it working live! As like my previous post this presentation got recorded during Marc Sewtz's APEX presentation. Again I edited it and put some music to it. The music is carefully chosen of course, but if you don't like it, put the volume to mute. The preview takes just over 4 minutes. Here we go...



A better quality video can be downloaded in m4v format or swf format.

Preview Oracle (APEX) Websheets - the next coolest thing

As I blogged yesterday, Mike Hichwa gave an insight in the future of Oracle Application Express. One of the things he showed were Oracle Websheets, the coolest thing I've ever seen and the next killer feature of APEX!

You can see Oracle Websheets as "Rocket APEX" or "RAD Extreme".

Websheets allow you to create a working application in no time. So it allows you to create applications in a very user friendly way. People can upload spreadsheets, extend it on the fly (even the underlaying data model for ex. adding a column), get web 2.0 features out of the box etc. So it makes APEX even more useful for "non-programmers" and it takes the declarative approach to the next level!

But that's not all, we APEX developers can also benefit from this nice piece of code as we would be able to reuse all the building blocks of websheets in our own applications or even just include a websheet in our APEX application. The best way to look at Websheets are Interactive Reports combines with tabular forms which you can edit, but with a side node it's completely web 2.0 and you've so much more features we have ever dreamed of.

Of course I could write a lot more about it, but screen shots are so much more fun!

So let's start...

First a disclaimer that Oracle has in it's presentations...


1. After you login in Websheets, you'll see a screen to create a websheet.
Just as in APEX you have different starting points. In this case we'll do the famous Excel conversion to something you have never seen before ;-)

2. We go to Excel where we have some data and copy all that


3. The wizards is really nice, after you copied it in the text box, you hit the submit button and bamm, there you go, your Oracle Websheets!


4. It looks like an Interactive Report in APEX, right? It's partially that, but I would like to see it as an "Interactive Report on Steroids"!


5. If you look at the "Wheel of Magic" you get so much more options than with Interactive Reports: add and remove columns, create LOVs, send notification mails, see the history of a record and much more. The below screenshot is to add a column Country, which exists out of a list of values.


7. The result looks like this, an additional column which you can change directly by selecting another value from the lov.

8. If you click on the edit link you can do a lot more: adding attachments, notes, links and tags.

9. Just like in Interactive Reports you can change the display of the columns on the fly


10. The result in the next screen. The Attachments column is included and you see that for a specific record there's an attachment.


11. And to keep the best for last... editing an Interactive Report, just like a tabular form!


So what do you think about that? ... I just love it!