Expert Oracle Application Express (second edition) available

During my holiday Apress released the second edition of Expert Oracle Application Express.

In the second edition we not only updated the content to APEX 5.0, but there're some new chapters in too from new authors. In total you get 14 chapters from 14 different authors.

I believe it's a very nice book with great content and it's for a good cause. Roel describes it very nicely in his blog post "the goal is to raise as much money as we can for the funds that support the relatives of two of the greatest Oracle APEX Development Team members who passed away a few years ago: Carl Backstrom and Scott Spadafore."

You can get it from the Apress website or from Amazon. Happy reading :)

First patch set (5.0.1) released for APEX 5.0

I know some people waiting till the first patch set that comes available after a major Oracle APEX release... today you no longer have to wait, APEX 5.0.1 is now available.

In the patch set notes you can read what changed.

If you're still on APEX 4.x you can go immediately to APEX 5.0.1, you only need to download the latest version on OTN.

If you're already on APEX 5.0, you can download the patch set from support.oracle.com, search for patch number 21364820. Applying the patch took less than 5 minutes in my environment.

This patch set updates the Universal Theme too, so don't forget to update your images folder. When you login in APEX after the patch, it will check if you have the correct images folder, if not it will give you an alert. Although I updated the images directory I still got that alert due to browser caching. Refresh your page and it should be ok.

Note that it's important to be on APEX 5.0.1 when you use APEX Office Print - currently available in beta for a select audience, public release end of this month (July 2015). Behind the scenes we use the APEX_JSON and APEX_WEB_SERVICE packages which got an update in APEX 5.0.1.

And finally, there's a nice new D3 chart available in APEX 5.0.1 called "D3 Collapsible Treemap Chart"

Happy upgrading...

Update 18-JUL-2015: there're still a couple of known issues, please read those too and install some patchset exception when necessary.

Make even more of UKOUG Tech15: APEX 5.0 UI Training - Dec 10th in Birmingham

APEX 5.0 has been released this spring. People who have already spent some time on this new version know this version is packed with new features aimed to make APEX developers even more productive, like the Page Designer.

Another striking new subset of features is aimed at creating better looking user interfaces for your APEX applications in an easy and maintainable way. 

The definition of user interface components in APEX 5.0 is very different to what we're used to. For example there is a new Universal Theme with Template Options and a Theme Roller. To get you up and running with this new toolset as quickly as possible, Dimitri Gielis of APEX R&D and Roel Hartman of APEX Consulting have joined forces and set up a one day course fully aimed at APEX 5.0 UI. So if you want to know not only how to use the new Theme, but also how to modify it to fit your needs, this is the event you should attend!

The training will be at the Jury’s Inn in Birmingham (UK) on Thursday Dec 10 - so conveniently immediately after the UKOUG Tech15 conference.

More information and registration see www.apextraining.eu. 

If you are from another country and think this training should be available in your country as well, please contact us - then we'll see what we can do!

Fixing Super LOV in Universal Theme

When you migrate to APEX 5.0 and the Universal Theme you might see that some plugins are not behaving correctly anymore. In this post I'll discuss the Enkitec Modal LOV plugin.

When I ran the plugin in my APEX 5.0 app with the Universal Theme it looked like this:

There's too much space in the search bar and the close button is not showing up with an icon.

Here're the steps I did to fix it. First you need to download the css file of the style you use and the js file from the plugin in Shared Components. I use the smoothness.css style most of the times, so I'll use that as an example.

To fix the close icon, add !important to the png:

.ek-ml .ui-state-default .ui-icon {
background-image: url(ui-icons_888888_256x240.png) !important;
}

Note: you can do that for all those png on line 467 till 489.

To fix the height, add following css to smoothness.css:

.superlov-button-container {
  height:50px;
}

And finally in enkitec_modal_lov.min.js change the height of the searchContainer from a dynamic height (r) to 0px:

$searchContainer.css("height","0px")

Next upload those files again to the plugin.

When you run the plugin it should give you this result:

Now the bigger question is; do we still need that plugin? In APEX 5.0 there're native Modal Pages, so you could create an Interactive Report and set the page as a Modal Page. Next you can hook that up to a button or link and you've just build your own Modal LOV.

I still like to use the plugin at the moment (as it's just one item on the page), but it could use a refresh to make it look nicer and more inline with Universal Theme.

Wonder what you think - would you build your own Modal LOV in APEX 5.0 or would you still prefer to use a plugin? 

2 minute Tech Tip: Working with JSON in APEX

On Monday Bob Rhubart did a video call with me in his series of 2MTT (2 Minute Tech Tip) on YouTube. You find my 2MMT here.

I talked about using JSON and APEX and gave two examples were we use it.

In previous blog posts I gave more details on those techniques. Here's a quick overview:

• Generate nested JSON from SQL with ORDS and APEX 5
• JSON for APEX Developers (part 1): REST and JSON
• JSON for APEX Developers (part 2): Consuming JSON in JavaScript
• JSON for APEX Developers (part 3): Querying JSON in Oracle DB 12c

Change first day of week in APEX 5.0 Calendar

APEX 5.0 comes with a new calendar region, which is way nicer than the previous calendar in APEX. It has more features, looks better and is also responsive. Behind the scenes you'll see the calendar region is based on Full Calendar.

In Belgium we use Monday as first day of the week, whereas in the US they seem to use Sunday as start of the week in the calendar overview. I've been integrating Full Calendar before, so I knew that library had an option to set the first day of the week. You could either specify an option called firstDay and set that to 1, or you could change the language, and depending the language it would adjust the start day of the week.

In APEX 5.0 I looked for that option, but there's not a specific attribute to set the first day of the week, instead it's based on the language of your application. If you go to Shared Components > Globalization Attributes by default it's set to en, which has Sunday as start of the week. If you set it to en-gb it will have Monday as start of the week.

I searched some time to find how to do it, so hopefully this post will help others to find it more easily. Thanks to Patrick for sharing the way it was implemented.

Enable Real Application Security (RAS) in APEX 5.0

Oracle Database 12c introduced Oracle Real Application Security (RAS), the next generation Oracle Virtual Private Database (VPD). In APEX 5.0 RAS is declaratively build-in. Follow the below steps to enable it:

Login to the INTERNAL workspace and go to Manage Instance > Security:

In the Real Application Security section set Allow Real Application Security to Yes.

Next login to the Workspace your Application is build in and go to your Authentication Scheme.
You'll see a new section in there called Real Application Security.

The dropdown has following possibilities:

• Disabled: Real Application Security does not get used in the application. 
• Internal Users: APEX creates a RAS session and assumes that all users are internal and passes false via the is_external parameter to dbms_xs_sessions.assign_user. 
• External Users: RAS session created and true gets passed via the is_external parameter to dbms_xs_sessions.assign_user. 

The last two options enable RAS Mode and make the Dynamic Roles and Namespaces shuttle available. (from the help in APEX) Make sure that the users get privileges to access the application's schema objects. For External Users, you can for example grant database privileges to a RAS Dynamic Application Role and configure it in this authentication scheme as a Dynamic Role. You can also enable roles via a call to apex_authorization.enable_dynamic_groups, e.g. in a Post-Authentication procedure.

You can read more about Oracle Real Application Security and view an entire example how to set up RAS at the database side. I'm still learning about all the RAS features myself too, but thought to already share the above. I plan to include a chapter in my e-book about RAS and APEX 5.0 with a real-case example, as I see a big benefit for using it in a highly regulatory, secure and audited environment.

JSON for APEX Developers (part 3): Querying JSON in Oracle DB 12c

In previous blog posts I talked about JSON for APEX Developers:

• Generate nested JSON from SQL with ORDS and APEX 5
• JSON for APEX Developers (part 1)
• JSON for APEX Developers (part 2)

In this post I want to show how you store and query JSON data straight in the database.

To start, create a table to store the JSON object:

CREATE TABLE ssn_json
   (id          NUMBER GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY NOT NULL,
    date_loaded DATE,
    json_document CLOB
    CONSTRAINT ensure_json CHECK (json_document IS JSON));

I inserted a couple of records in the table:

Here's in more detail the JSON in the json_document column:

Now to query the JSON data I can do :

You basically say j (table) . json_document (column) . analyses (first entry in JSON) . ... (other fields of the hierarchy you want to navigate to)
 
You see the data I get back is actually two records as I actually get back the JSON array.

To go into the array and see for example the first record, I can use json_value:

Note that the array start with 0.

And finally to see both records that are in the JSON array I can make use of json_table like this:

The above is just a grasp of what you can do with JSON directly in the database (12c) by using SQL.
If you're interested to read more about how to manipulate JSON in the database, have a look at the documentation, it contains a wealth on information with great examples.

As you can basically query the JSON with SQL you can use this SQL in your APEX reports... in the coming days I'll show you a real case where I used the above techniques to do some interesting searching in data.

Oracle APEX 5.0 released today

After 2.5 years of development, today is the day APEX 5.0 is publicly released and ready to be downloaded to install on your own environment.

In my view it's the best release ever. Not so much of the new Page Designer - although that is definitely a piece of art and it increased productivity even further - but because it's the first time whole of APEX got refreshed and every piece was put under a radar to see how it could be improved. All the small changes and the new UI, together with the Page Designer makes it a whole new development tool, without losing it's strengths from before.

Also note that APEX 5.0 enables many new features build on top of the Oracle Database 12c features, so if you're on that database, you'll see even more nice features.

If you wonder if you should wait with upgrading to APEX 5.0 because you're afraid that your current APEX applications break, I can only share that I upgraded many of my applications as part of EA/beta and most of my apps kept running without issues. As always you have to try your applications yourself, but the APEX development team spend a lot of time trying to keep things backwards compatible. But make sure to have a look at the APEX 5.0 release notes and known issues as they contain important information about changes, expected behaviour and workarounds.

You can develop online on apex.oracle.com or you can download APEX 5.0 and install into your own environment.

Working with multiple Trees on the same APEX Page (4.2/5.0)

Ever tried to put multiple Trees on the same page in APEX 4.2?

Here's my example:

On the left Tree the "Selected Node Link with" is set to hidden item P1_TREE1, on the right Tree the value that sets the tree is set to P1_TREE2. At least it should do that, but by default if you're values are not unique - in this case empno is the value behind both trees - it doesn't work...
Your first tree will be highlighted twice; one time for ALLEN and one time for SCOTT and not as it should be, on the left ALLEN selected and on the right SCOTT selected.

To fix this issue in APEX 4.2, you need to adapt your select statement so you have unique values for both trees. I typically put a meaningful character in front of the value; for example you can concatenate 'N' for new values (new tree) and 'O' for old values (old tree).

So that fixes the issue of the "Selected Node Page Item" issue with non unique values.
Behind the tree implementation in APEX 4.2, jsTree is used. APEX is not using the most recent version and the way the JavaScript is coded doesn't really work that nicely. If you really like jsTree and for example want to search in it, or you have a very large dataset, check out Tom Petrus' tree plugin and explanation.

So what about APEX 5.0? The tree implementation in APEX 5.0 has the same functionalities, but is a lot better. Behind the scenes jsTree is not used anymore, instead the tree that is also used in the Page Designer is used. The issue with unique values is off the table, so no worries anymore in APEX 5.0.

APEX 5.0: pimping the Login page

When you create a new application in APEX 5.0, the login page probably looks like this:

I love the build-in login page of APEX itself - luckily it's easy enough to build that in our own apps too. Thank you APEX Dev team!

The first step is to change the region type to be of Login Region Template:

We want to add a nice icon on top of the Login text. You can use the Icon CSS Class in the Region options - in this case I opted for fa-medkit:

Next up is making the Login button bigger and make it the complete width like the items.

In APEX 5.0 you can use the Template Options to do that:

Once we stretched the Login button it fits the entire size.

Next up is getting some icons in the username and password field.

For the username we use the "icon-login-username" css class.

Instead of the label we make that hidden and specify a placeholder, so before you start typing you see the word username and when you start typing the text disappears.

For the password field we do the same thing, but for the css class we specify "icon-login-password".

Finally your login screen looks like this:

Great? Absolutely - and so easy with APEX 5.0!

What's next? Is there anything better? Euh... yes, what about live validation?
Sure we can do that in APEX 5.0 without too much hassle :)) Thanks once again APEX Dev Team!

In the item make sure the item is set to Value Required and add in the Post Text following span:

That will give you a nice visual indication if you entered text:

Cool? Creating login pages in APEX 5.0 is ... (you fill in the word)

Interested in more? We're doing an APEX 5.0 UI Training in May.

Loading CSV files with special characters in Oracle DB

I often need to load the data of Excel or CSV files into the Oracle Database.

Ever got those annoying question marks when you try to load the data? or instead of question marks you just get empty blanks when the file is using special characters? Here's an example:

My database characterset is UTF-8, so ideally you want to load your data UTF-8 encoded.

With Excel I've not found an easy way to specify the encoding to UTF-8 when saving to a CSV file.

Although in Excel (OSX) - Preferences - General - Web Options - Encoding, I specified UTF-8, it still saves the file as Western (Mac OS Roman).

I've two workarounds I use to get around the issue. Open the file in a text editor e.g. BBEdit and click the encoding option and select UTF-8.

Another way is to open Terminal and use the iconv command line tool to convert the file

iconv -t UTF8 -f MACROMAN < file.csv > file-utf8.csv

If you get a CSV file and you want to import it in Excel first, the best way I found is to create a new Workbook and import the CSV file (instead of opening directly). You can import either by using File - Import or Data - Get External Data - Import Text File. During the import you can specify the File origin and you can see which data format works for you.

After the manipulations in Excel you can save again as CSV as outlines above to make sure you resulting CSV file is UTF-8 encoded.

Finally to import the data you can use APEX, SQL Developer or SQLcl to load your CSV file into your table.

Oracle Database Tools updated - check out SQLcl

Today Oracle released new versions of:

• SQL Developer 4.1 EA2
• SQL Developer Data Modeler 4.1 EA2
• SQLcl (below SQL Developer downloads)

Also Oracle REST Data Services 3 got a new EA2 version.

You may want to check Kris Rice's blog for new features.

I already blogged about all of the tools before, but not yet about SQLcl.

This is a command line tool, I call it "SQL*Plus on steroids" (or as Jeff calls it SQL Developer meets SQL*Plus). It's particularly useful when you're on your server and quickly need to run some queries. Or if you're a command line guy/girl all the time, this tool is for you.

Here's a screenshot how to connect to your database with SQLcl from Linux.

Typing help will show you a list of quick shortcuts.

For example if you type APEX you get a list of your APEX applications

What I really like about SQLcl is that it formats the output so nicely. With SQL*Plus you had to set column widths, page sizes etc. Not with SQLcl, it's smart and formats it nicely.

Next to that you can quickly output your query in JSON format by typing "set sqlformat json":

There're many more features - a good starting point is this presentation and video by Jeff Smith.

APEX 5.0: the way to use Theme Roller

Once you have your new application created using the Universal Theme it's time to customise your theme with Theme Roller.

Run your application and click the Theme Roller link in the APEX Developer Toolbar:

Theme Roller will open. I won't go in every section, but want to highlight the most important sections in Theme Roller in this post:

1. Style: there're two styles that come with APEX 5.0: Blue and Gray. You can start from one of those and see how your application changes color. It will set predefined colors for the different parts of the templates.
   
   
2. Color Wheel: when you want to quickly change your colors, an easy way to see different options is by using the Color Wheel. You've two modes: monochroom (2 points) and dual color (3 points - see screenshot). By changing one point it will map the other point to a complementary color. Next you can move the third point to play more with those colors.
   
   
3. Global Colors: if the Color Wheel is not specific enough for what you need, you can start by customising the Global Colors. Those are the main colors of the Universal Theme and used to drive the specific components. You can still customise the different components e.g. the header by clicking further down in the list (see next screenshot).
   
   
4. Containers etc. will allow you to define the specific components. A check icon will say it's the standard color coming with the selected style. An "x" means the color was changed and an "!" means the contrast is probably not great.

Original with style

After changing colors

This is just awesome... but what if you don't like the changes you did?

Luckily you can Reset either your entire style or you can refresh the specific section by clicking the refresh icon. There's also an undo and redo button. But that is not all... for power users when you hit "ALT" when hovering a color you can just reset that color! (only that color will get a refresh icon in it and clicking it will reset it)

Note that all changes you're making are locally stored on your computer in your browsers cache (HTML5 local storage), so you don't effect other users by playing with the different colors.

Finally when you are done editing your color scheme you can hit the Save As button to save all colors to a new Style. When you close Theme Roller the style will go back how it was.
The final step to apply the new style so everybody sees that version, is to go to User Interface Details (Shared Components) and set the style to the new one.

Note that this blog post is written based on APEX 5.0 EA3, in the final version of APEX 5.0 (or 5.1) you might apply the new style from Theme Roller directly.

Want to know more about Theme Roller and the Universal Theme - we're doing an APEX 5.0 UI Training May 12th in the Netherlands.

APEX 5.0 Fixed Headings for Interactive Reports

When you click on the Attributes of your Interactive Report there's a neath little new features included called "Heading - Fixed to" with as options: None, Region and Page

We've got this request from many customers and it has always been a pain to get it working in every condition with APEX 4.x, but no hacking anymore - it's there now in APEX 5.0.
When you start to scroll the column header will move up and the content will scroll underneath it.

Here's a quick demo:

APEX 5.0 EA3 - Universal Theme Styles - Gray!

In APEX 5.0 theme 42 is included - this is the Universal Theme. The theme comes with two styles: Blue and Gray.

The UI is so much improved in APEX 5, it's really a game changer. When you look at the details for example from such a style you will see it's using a Less file (Less is a CSS pre-processor) behind the scenes. So it's very easy to make changes to the CSS. But you probably even don't need to do that as the development team allows you to make customisations with ThemeRoller which generates JSON (another nice example where JSON is used - interested in JSON - I did some other posts on this blog about JSON).

To change the color for example, below you see the JSON for that.

Note that Theme Roller will generate the JSON for you. Accept from those customisations, the blue and gray style are using the exact same css.

From the Blue style many screenshots have been posted already, but I love the Gray style too, here's a screenshot when you switch the sample application's style to Gray.

APEX 5.0 EA3 released with Universal Theme

Today Oracle released the latest Early Adopter release of APEX 5.0.

The release is packed with new features, but one of the biggest improvements you can find in the UI.

For me the Universal Theme with Theme Roller, Theme Styles and Template Options is the absolute killer feature of APEX 5.0. I can't better describe Universal Theme as how Oracle is describing it:

Universal Theme is an all-new user interface for your applications that has been built from the ground up for Application Express 5. It is a simpler, yet more capable theme that does away with excessive templates and enable effortless customization with Theme Roller, Template Options, and Theme Styles. Universal Theme is the culmination of all of our UI enhancements and aims to empower developers to build modern, responsive, sophisticated applications without requiring expert knowledge of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.

The issue with APEX 4.x was the build-in themes became out-dated today, so many of us looked at integrating Bootstrap, Foundation or other frameworks. But APEX 5.0 has send us at WARP-speed to a new UI, suddenly out-of-the-box your applications are modern, responsive, flat, ... everything you can expect from a UI today. Many new components are now part of the UI: like the new Carousel and Cards region are some of my favourites.

If you are interested to know everything about the new UI, Roel and I teamed up with a one-day APEX 5.0 UI Training day.

Happy playing with APEX 5.0 EA3 and don't forget to give feedback to the development team, this is the last time you can before APEX 5.0 hits production.

Preparing architecture for APEX 5.0 upgrade

I doubted to set the title of this post to "Running APEX 4.2 and 5.0 in the same Oracle instance", but decided not to do that, but that is basically what I will do. Before going into details, I'll share my architecture.

In December 2013 I wrote it was time to update your APEX environment and I gave a quick overview of the architecture we're using. I thought it's time to review that post, so below you find how my preferred APEX architecture is today and tomorrow (once APEX 5 is production).

I'm using Apache as a reverse proxy in front of Tomcat. I'm not going in too much detail about which version to take: Apache v2.2 vs 2.4 and Tomcat v7 vs 8. There're many threads on the internet about that and I guess it depends your environment and your personal feeling. I've been using both versions but currently I'm on Apache v2.2 because it comes as a default with RHEL / OEL6 and SELinux is configured out of the box to protect the webserver. And for Tomcat I'm using v8 as that's the basis for the future versions of Tomcat (v9) and when you want to do Websockets for example, v8 has a more improved spec.

A few years ago we had the discussion about mod_plsql vs APEX Listener (now Oracle REST Data Services - ORDS). I think today, it's clear ORDS is the way to go as it gives you much more features and is proven technology.

For APEX I'm always on the latest version as fast as I can, as with every new release there're great improvements and fixes.

And finally the Oracle Database I'm on 12cR1 because I like the pluggable database concept and the other features it brings. I guess most people will go to 12c very soon, as 11.2 premier support ends this month. You can read more about when what is still supported in this doc.

But in this post I want to show you how easy it is to prepare your environment for APEX 5 and to test the upgrade with an architecture as above. I basically want to run APEX 4.2 and 5.0 next to each other. I'll clone my PDB and apply the APEX 5 installation on the new PDB. Next I'll configure ORDS so it knows to which database it needs to point to depending the url I'll call.

Step 1. Clone the PDB 

sqlplus / as sysdba

create pluggable database APEX50_PDB from APEX42_PDB file_name_convert=('/u01/app/oracle/oradata/cdb/APEX42_PDB','/u01/app/oracle/oradata/cdb/APEX50_PDB');


Step 2. Open the PDB and install APEX 5.0

alter pluggable database apex50_pdb open;

So now we have a new database which is a copy of our existing database open and ready to be used. Next we will need to install APEX 5.0. As the time of writing APEX 5.0 is not available yet, but it will probably be - connect to the new PDB and run @apexins... (follow the installation guide of APEX 5.0 once available!)

Step 3. Configure ORDS

With SQL Developer you can configure ORDS and add the connection to the new PDB.
In SQL Developer 4.1, first setup a connection to your ORDS (Tools > Manage REST Data Services Connections > Add Connection). Next open the ORDS Administration window (View > REST Data Services > Administration). Right click on the REST Data Services and Connect to ORDS:

You'll see the current configuration.

In order to connect to the new database we need to add a Database. Right click in Database Settings and add a new database. Before writing it back (the icon with the green up arrow - click the Test Settings button first (the icon with a v) to make sure everything is fine.

Final step is to let ORDS know that if we put in our url /apex50 we want to connect to the new database. You can do that by adding an entry in URL Mapping:

That's it...

Note: sometimes I've issues with adding the database and URL Mapping in SQL Developer, but it's as fast to do it command line too. The doc has a great example which commands to run: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37099_01/doc.20/e25066/config.htm#AELIG7191


Step 4. Test

When you navigate to your normal url e.g. http://localhost/ords/f?p=ABC you will see your APEX 4.2 instance, but if you navigate to http://localhost/ords/apex50/f?p=ABC you'll see the APEX 5.0 instance.

You can play a bit more with making it nicer urls or do some redirects in Apache, but I hope you get the idea how to start testing APEX 5.0 while still running APEX 4.2 too.

Announcement: APEX 5.0 UI Training - May 12th

APEX 5.0 will be released between now and the end of May. People who have already spent some time on the Early Adopter versions know this version is packed with new features aimed to make APEX developers even more productive, like the Page Designer.

Another striking new subset of features is aimed at creating better looking user interfaces for your APEX applications in an easy and maintainable way.

The definition of user interface components in APEX 5.0 is very different to what we're used to. For example there is a new Universal Theme with Template Options and a Theme Roller.

To get you up and running with this new toolset as quickly as possible, Dimitri Gielis of APEX R&D and Roel Hartman of APEX Consulting have joined forces and set up a one day course fully aimed at APEX 5.0 UI. So if you want to know not only how to use the new Theme, but also how to modify it to fit your needs, this is the event you should attend!

The training will be at the Mitland Hotel in Utrecht (NL) on Tuesday May 12.
More information and registration see www.apextraining.eu.

If you are from another country and think this training should be available in your country as well, please contact us - then we'll see what we can do!