My schedule and conferences

In the next months there are some nice Oracle and APEX conferences. It looks like APEX is getting more interest every year...

Some people asked when I would be in a particular part of the world, so here is my schedule till July:

- March 11th: APEX presentation and meet-up at Ordina, Utrecht, Netherlands
- April 20th-22th: European APEX Training Days, Manchester, UK
- May 3rd-7th: APEX sessions at IOUG Collaborate 2009, Orlando, Florida
- May 11th-12th: Oracle Education Application Express Advanced, Paris, France
- June 21th-25th: APEX sessions at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009, Monterey, CA

I'll blog more about the events in the next weeks.

There are some more trips planned to other parts of the world, but these dates are not fixed yet.

Although it's sometimes hard to be away from family (and for my family it's also not easy), I got a nice surprise from British Airways: I got upgraded to Silver Member, so my flights will be a bit nicer ;-)

Look forward to see you at one of the events.

UKOUG APEX SIG - the day after

On Friday I was in the UK for the first UKOUG APEX SIG. More than 50 people attended (the event was fully booked), more than 20 people were on the waiting list... just to show APEX is getting more and more attention.

Justin Hudd, the organizer of the event, gave an introduction and asked the people in the room about their experience in APEX. As usual we had a very mixed public: people just starting with APEX, people starting to do projects in it and then people with already a couple of years experience. But I was surprised, when the question came who's using APEX in his company (in production), 2/3 of the people raised their hand. That must have been the biggest difference with previous years, where people were looking at it and used it on the side. Now it seems to be used in production very much.

David Peake, product manager of Oracle Application Express, started with the first real presentation. He talked about the "Latest & Greatest from Development" where he gave an update on APEX 3.2 and 4.0. He talked about the APEX Listener, updateable tabular forms etc. (see SOD), but ofcourse the demos where the nicest. He did a migration of Forms to APEX (you can try that on apex.oracle.com too) and showed the new security features in APEX 3.2. For APEX 4.0 he showed Websheets and Dynamic Actions. I was in the back of the room and saw people looking at eachother with a face of "Oh my God" ;-)


In the next presentation of David (he was on all morning) he showed where APEX is used internally at Oracle, and which products Oracle brought out build in APEX. That presentation showed once more that APEX is not there for a short time, but will be a crucial option of the Oracle database.

In the afternoon I talked about Charts in APEX and beyond. The reason I changed the title of my presentation at the last moment was because Anychart brought out version 5.1.2 on the same day. The 5.1.2 release is really, really nice and I wanted to show a part of the new features as well. I'll do another blog post about the new version in the next days. Our APEX-Anychart integration site got already updated, but we're in the progress to extend it with some new examples and to provide you with a new download.


Next we saw a case study "Using Apex to Expose your Business to the Web" by Matt Nolan and Vincent Migue from e-DBA. They showed their own site and a project they did where they used a lot of web 2.0 features (scriptaculus, jquery etc.). You couldn't see the site was build in APEX as it had a complete different look and feel.


The final presentation of the event was by John Scott about "Dispelling Myths about Application Express". If your customers of your company is still not convinced of the power of APEX, you should definitely have a look at John's presentation! Most of the critics on APEX he proofs it's untrue with real numbers.


Before going to the bar we had a Q&A where people could ask anything they liked. We got questions about the integration of Oracle Apps and APEX (white paper to come soon), performance in APEX etc. One of the people in the audience was Jonathan Lewis. I found it very special to talk to an audience when such a respectful and knowledgeable person is in front of you.

I believe it was a very positive first APEX SIG in the UK and I guess something that won't end after this first one.

And finally some pictures from the bar...

test APEX 3.2 for everybody

Today Joel Kallman updated apex.oracle.com to APEX 3.2.0.



This means that after a period where only a few people had access to a beta version, you can test it out yourself!

In December I gave a demo of APEX 3.2 to a customer and they were pretty impressed with the product. It's definitely not a silver bullet, but it can be a good starting point and a great tool to manage your migration from Forms to APEX.

Next to the Forms Migration tool, APEX 3.2 brings some important security updates.

It won't take long before we can actually download the new version of APEX now...

Being in the UK

This morning I took the plane to the UK and instead of flying to Heathrow, I flew to Gatwick.

The flight was pretty good. I was impressed the stewardess new my name! I booked the flight through BA, but the flight was operated by SN Brussels Airlines and it happened that the BA standards correspond to the highest standard of SN. I had seat 1F, so not bad ;-)

Gatwick is a lot bigger than I thought and it's pretty good arranged: no queu to enter the UK, good trains... I was pleasantly surprised.

Tomorrow I'm traveling further to London and on Friday I'll be at the UKOUG APEX SIG.

I asked to change my presentation "What happens on an APEX page" by "Charts in APEX and beyond" as I really believe charts are so cool and Anychart 5.1.2 (due very very soon) even cooler.

Some date related tips to remember

The function INTERVAL DAY TO SECOND already exists from 9i, but I didn't use it that much before.

An Oracle By Example goes into more detail.

In APEX I created a quick example to show you how you can calculate the difference for dates. Behind the Calculate button I call a Process with this logic:

:P28_INTERVAL_DAY_TO_SECOND := CAST ( TO_DATE(:P28_end_date,'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI') AS TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE )
- CAST ( TO_DATE(:P28_start_date,'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI') AS TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE );

If you are looking for recurrent events (repeating intervals) you can use dbms_scheduler. In the early years of HTMLDB I created an APEX app called Agendimi which was basically an "online Outlook" for teachers. I wish I had the dbms_scheduler package to my disposal at that time!

Here's an example (found here, but adapted for APEX) to get the next 7 days (a plsql region in Apex on the same example page as above:

DECLARE
start_date        TIMESTAMP;
return_date_after TIMESTAMP;
next_run_date     TIMESTAMP;
BEGIN
start_date := CAST ( TO_DATE(:P28_start_date,'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI') AS TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE );
htp.p('Next 7 days (only weekdays)');
return_date_after := start_date;
FOR i IN 1..7
LOOP
 dbms_scheduler.evaluate_calendar_string(
'FREQ=DAILY;BYHOUR=9;BYMINUTE=0;BYDAY=MON,TUE,WED,THU,FRI', start_date, return_date_after, next_run_date);

 htp.p(TO_CHAR(next_run_date,'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI Day'));
 return_date_after := next_run_date;
END LOOP;
END;

Another nice one FM... I needed a date format like 1.1.2009, so I thought d.m.yyyy, but I couldn't put that into Oracle. Try: select to_char(sysdate,'d.m.yyyy') from dual; You'll get a nice ORA-01821 date format not recognised. So how do you get that format then?

You need to put FM in front of your date format:

select to_char(sysdate,'FMdd.mm.yyyy') from dual;

new ODTUG blog

Mike Riley, President of ODTUG, started a new blog yesterday.

If you want to know more about him, the working behind the scenes of ODTUG or other news about the ODTUG conference, keep an eye on his blog.

I also want to congratulate Mike to become President for 2009. I know him as a very motivated person with a great personality. I'm sure he'll be doing great...

Welcome to cyberspace Mike!

Create some dynamic data

When you are developing an application with a new database design (or an existing database design, but you didn't get any data), it can be handy to quickly create some test data in your tables.

Sure you can create some data manual to test your input forms, but what if you need more data? Or you want to test the performance with a large amounts of records.

Here's a simple select statement that creates you 25.000 random numbers and strings (you can change the number to whatever number you like):

SELECT rownum RNUM
, ABS(MOD(dbms_random.random,100000)) RANDOM_NBR
, dbms_random.string('A', 20) RANDOM_STR
FROM dual
CONNECT BY level <= 25000

You could also create a little procedure that populates your tables with it as you probably have some relationships going on as well (PK-FK). I just needed a select that generates me huge amount of records to test some charts in APEX with.

Update (thanks to Rob - see comments): dbms_random should not be used anymore, see the 10g and 11g documentation. So the select statement from 10g onwards would be:

SELECT rownum RNUM
, trunc(dbms_random.value(1,100000)) RANDOM_NBR
, dbms_random.string('A', 20) RANDOM_STR
FROM dual
CONNECT BY level <= 25000

Anychart 5.1 released

Today Anychart released version 5.1 of their charting product. I really looked forward to this release as it has some really nice features in!

We are currently working hard to get it compatible with the APEX integration kit, so if you're using this together with our kit, you'll need to wait a bit longer before doing the upgrade.

Here are some of my favorite new features:

Scrolling Support

All X / Y Axes based charts (Bar, Line, Area, Candlestick, etc.) can have Axes with scroll bar. You can also control the scroll barts with Javascript.

Heat Map Chart

Heatmap Charts, allows you to give graphical representation of data where the values taken by a variable in a two-dimensional map are represented as colors.

If you hover the legend the right numbers light up.

2D/3D Funnel Charts

Feature rich Funnel Charts both in 2D and 3D, smart labeling, animation, neck control and man more option.

3D Pie Charts and 3D Doughnut Charts

Nice looking, interactive 3D Pie Charts and 3D Doughnut Charts with Animation and all features of regular flat Pie and Doughnut Charts.

There are a lot of other nice features like Multiple X-Axis Support, One or more Interactive Labels or Tooltips, a combination of any chart type in a Dashboard etc. The complete list of changes you find here.

But as a last one... some people told me they would like to have better performance in their charts. Anychart 5.1 will help you with that!

AnyChart 5.1 is based on a new charting engine, which made it possible to improve performance and decrease rendering and update time dramatically. The new engine also allows to used larger data sets without significant time lags, and this applies to all chart types, including AnyMap extension. The below chart says enough...


PS: If you want to buy Anychart 5.1 you can still use the coupon code APEX15 to get a 15% discount!

One day APEX seminar by UK APEX SIG

The UK APEX SIG is kicking off with a one day free seminar on Friday 13th February in the Oracle City Office in London.

There will be five presentation by different speakers and you'll have also time to ask questions to the Experts. Justin Hudd, the organizer behind the event, will start with an introduction, shortly followed by following presentations:

• Latest & Greatest from Development by David Peake
• Apex @ Oracle – Learn How Oracle Utilises Application Express by Anthony Rayner
• What happens on an APEX Page? by Dimitri Gielis (me)
• Using Apex to Expose your Business to the Web by Matt Nolan & Vincent Migue
• Dispelling Myths about Application Express by John Scott

We'll finish the day with an Apex Forum where you can ask any question... and then the bar!

I booked my flight to Belgium the following day, so I don't mind still talking about APEX with some drinks and food till late at night ;-)

Hope to see you there! (more info, see agenda)

Update from UKOUG: If you are a UKOUG member you can attend for free. But there is a non-member rate set up of £160 plus VAT. As members of UKOUG you get one space per membership free, then any additional places are charged the members rate of £80 plus VAT.


PS: We got some questions if our 3-day European APEX Training Days of March are still on? The answer is yes! We're handling the last details for the location (will be in Manchester, UK). More information will follow shortly.

JQuery UI, ThemeRoller and transparent datepicker

Recently we had some issues with JQuery UI which didn't render the widgets correctly.

An example of a JQuery UI widget is the datepicker (screenshot), like you can see working on Apex Blogs

If you want to change the look and feel of the date picker (or any other widget) you can do that by creating a new theme on the ThemeRoller site or by selecting one of the gallery.

However while we did that our datepicker became transparent and it looked like it couldn't find the css or the background images anymore. As we already used it in more projects, we were sure our code was right.

Finally we found that a different version of the JQuery UI can get you into that situation. The fix then is to use the version you know your css works with or to download the latest version of JQuery UI and create the theme again from the site and use that instead.

Daddy, time to rest - Merry Christmas and Happy 2009

2008 past away as the speed of light! Everything went so fast and so many things happened, but now it's time for my daddy to have some rest and spend some more time with me.

If I look what my daddy did in 2008, I'm amazed... in work he

• spend way to much time in the airports, did around 40 flights in 2008
• visited a lot of different countries and places, some for the first time
  
• presented one or more presentations and organized APEX-Meetups on 4 Oracle conferences: IOUG, ODTUG, OOW, UKOUG
• did two European APEX Trainings Days
  
• worked on different APEX projects; from small to enterprise level
  
• received the Oracle ACE Directors award
• released ApexBlogs.info, a blog aggregator written in APEX to catch all the posts about APEX
• released Anychart 5 for APEX integration
• and much much more
  
• but he lost also a great friend
  

Looking closer at me, he

• saw me growing really quickly and I also became more smarter every day
• saw me crawling and not much later walking and running (now daddy and mummy need to keep their eyes on me, as I can go everywhere and reach anything I want :-))
  
• started to build a nice home with lot of space to put my toys and a nice garden
  

Daddy also told me to thank you all for the wonderful experience and he hopes to see you again in the first week of January 2009...

I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

APEX @ UKOUG

I'm running behind with my blog posts!

On Monday I went to see David Peake's presentation about APEX now and in the future. Although I already saw this presentation multiple times it was nice to see it again and see the reaction of the public. And to be honest, I should do a new post about APEX 3.2 (Forms migration) as the screens change every time he does the presentation ;-)


That session was also the start to meet all the other APEX enthusiasts.

Later that afternoon I went to Tom Kyte's keynote about The Best Way. I always like to hear Tom speaking. Basically he said that it depends circumstances what "the best way" is and that "the best way" can change over time, which is ofcourse, very true.

After the opening party we organized a little APEX Meetup. We had some nice drinks and went to a pizza place with 8 people. We had some great fun! From left to (back to) right: Joao, Roel, Anthony, John, myself, Simon, David and Paulo. Thanks guys for the lovely evening and special thanks to Simon and David to get us a round. The pictures says all...


On Tuesday it was John Scott's turn to talk about APEX Best Practices. Especially after Tom Kyte's presentation this was a great presentation ;-) To be serious, the best practices, or hints and tips that John talked about I don't think will change that quick over time. To name some of his best practices: not everybody need to login as an admin, use bind variables, use page comments and locking etc. So great things to follow I would say.


Later that afternoon I went to see Marco Gralike with his presentation about XMLDB. Marco is very knowledgeable about XMLDB and I strongly believe APEX and XMLDB can work nicely together. For ex some of the techniques are used in DG Tournament or the APEX Blog Aggregator.

Later that day there was a Tools debat about APEX, JDEV and Forms. The product managers of Oracle were in the panel: David Peake for APEX, Duncan Mills for JDEV and Grant Ronald for Forms. It was a relaxed chat about the different products and to be honest I'm not against any of the products. I think they all fit in an environment and can even work nicely together. One of the messages was that Forms is supported till 2017! So why would you migrate if Forms is still doing everything you need? But if you are looking for something else you can migrate to APEX or JDEV. We (Apex Evangelists) don't tend to do a full blown migration at once, but a softer approach where both environments work together for some time. So far that works well for our clients. I'm not sure you knew, but in the past I also developed in BC4J (around 2003) and I must say things in JDEV land have changed quickly. At that time I found it hard to decide which UI to choice (BC4J, UIX etc), but today it seems JSF is the way to go.
I found the talk very interesting and definitely something that would fit in every conference.

Later that afternoon I went to Steven Fueurstein's Weird PL/SQL. If you didn't have a change yet to see Steven, try to attend one of his sessions. They are always nice to follow. He basically talked about the "strange" decisions/things in PL/SQL. If you go to the I Love PLSQL site you can see these things and send Bryn Llewellyn a mail and ask to change it. (btw that site is created in APEX)

My last session of the day was from Sue Harper about Developing with SQL Developer. This was more one of an introduction where she covered a lot of different things you can find in SQL Developer. But I promised myself to do another post about that and the nice integration with APEX.

I'm going to try to do another post about the other sessions tomorrow.

APEX Meetup @ UKOUG on Monday

Next week the UKOUG conference is going on. I'm flying to Birmingham on Monday and will stay till Thursday. I believe UKOUG is one of the biggest Oracle conferences in Europe. It's a pity it's the same time as DOAG, but that is mostly towards the German speaking people. 

There are also some APEX presentations at UKOUG:

What’s Hot and What’s Not – an Overview of Oracle Development Tools	Mr Sten Vesterli	01/12/2008 11:00 - 12:00 Track Track 5
Oracle Application Express Now and in the Future	Mr David Peake	01/12/2008 13:10 - 14:10 Track Track 6
Application Express Best Practices	Mr John Scott	02/12/2008 11:05 - 11:50 Track Track 4
"Tools: APEX, JDEV, Forms, SQL DEV - the choice is yours"	Mr Grant Ronald	02/12/2008 13:15 - 14:00 Track Roundtables
A Delicious Blend of BI Publisher and Application Express Bursting with Flavour!	Mr Nathan Morgan	03/12/2008 11:45 - 12:30 Track Track 8
Mastering charts in Oracle Application Express (APEX)	Mr Dimitri Gielis	04/12/2008 09:25 - 10:10 Track Track 5
(Re)Developing a logistic application in APEX in the real world	Mr Roel Hartman	04/12/2008 15:05 - 15:50 Track Track 5
Securing an APEX application on a Microsoft platform	Mr Andy Ogg	04/12/2008 16:25 - 17:10 Track Track 5

As you can see I'll talk about charts in Oracle Application Express on Thursday. I'll start to explain how you can create charts in APEX and make them prettier and what is happening under the hood. I'll discuss there are different versions of charts in APEX (based on Anychart 3.3 and 4.1) and at the end I'll also try to quickly show the apex migration kit to Anychart 5.

In the APEX Forum we also talked about having an APEX Meetup on Monday after the opening party (20.30h). We'll probably meet at the entrance of the opening party or you can follow David Peake, John Scott, Anthony Rayner, myself or some others to the "APEX heaven".

See you in  a few days!

Group Headings in an Interactive Report (APEX)

Did you ever wanted a group heading above your column headings in an Interactive Report in APEX? I wondered why that wasn't already included in APEX, as all components are there to get it to work. Let's create a little example to show what I mean.

Create an Interactive Report on the emp table (for ex. select * from emp).

In your Interactive Report details there's a section Column Groups where you can define groups.
But it also says: "Column Groups are used to group columns together on the single row view."
In my example I created two groups.


Next we need to edit the group to say which columns belong to which group.
In my example I specified that the columns Empno and Ename belong to Group 1. I specified some other columns for my Group 2.


If you run the page you'll see this IR (without group headings)


But when you select the single row view (the Edit icon in front of the row) you'll see this:


So you can see the groups nicely in the single row view but it's not there in the normal report...

So I thought, as APEX is completely dictionary driven, we should be able to find all the pieces and with some javascript we should be able to change the DOM element to include the group headings in the normal report too. The result:

You can see this example live here, the source code is also there, so you can see how I did things.

On the page I open the "Select Columns" automatically, so you can see the available columns and the groups in () and you can dynamically play with showing and hiding columns.

In short the way it works:
1) Query the APEX dictionary to see which columns and groups there are defined and return a string that can be parsed into a json object.
2) Create a javascript function to add the group headings above the column headers. I put some notes in the javascript and added a lot of console.log's. If you remove the // you'll see in Firebug a full trace what is happening.
3) To attach it to the Interactive Report and call it from your page you need to do some more. At OOW I had a chat with Carl about it, at the moment you can't call your own function at the end when the interactive report is called (but he was going to change that in future releases). Carl told me I was forced to put a little timeout there to make sure the Interactive Report was drawn before my javascript ran.

Feel free to try it in your own environment and give some feedback. The code is generic so you should be able to plug it into your environment without that much effort. I didn't use jquery as I wanted a generic solution for a "normal" APEX environment. Another thing I didn't do is looking if you defined a link (edit icon) before the row or not. So these might be enhancements for the next release...

Flashback table data prevented by a constraint

When I was reorganizing some tables I deleted some data which at the end I wanted to reuse.
I was pretty confident that with the flashback technology in the Oracle database I could get my data again. So I was surprised when I got the message "ORA-01466: unable to read data - table definition has changed".


I thought I had done something wrong so I build a small test case to see what was happening.

-- Create table with one record
create table t (b varchar2(100));
insert into t values ('hello world - works');
commit;
-- Look at the data
select * from t;
-- What timestamp did I still see my data -19-NOV-08 02.09.23.478019000 PM +00:00
SELECT SYSTIMESTAMP FROM dual;
-- Create an index
create index t_idx on t (b);
-- Delete all the data from my table and commit
delete from t;
commit;
-- There's no data anymore, nice
select * from t;
-- And with the flashback technology I see my data
select * from t as of timestamp to_timestamp('19-NOV-08 02.09.23.478 PM');
-- Insert another record
insert into t values ('hello world - no go');
commit;
-- Do some DDL on the table now, add a constraint
alter table t add constraint t_pk primary key (b)
select * from t;
-- I still see my data at this stage, but now we drop the constraint and delete the records
alter table t drop constraint t_pk;
delete from t;
commit;
-- Use flashback again
select * from t as of timestamp to_timestamp('19-NOV-08 02.09.23.478 PM');
-- I can't get to my data anymore

When reading through the documentation this made it clear: "Oracle Database cannot restore a table to an earlier state across any DDL operations that change the structure of the table".

Oracle does have limits ;-) and time for me to read through the documentation again...

Anychart 5 integration kit for APEX

A few days ago we released our Anychart 5 integration kit for Oracle Application Express (APEX).

Background

APEX has the ability to create (flash) charts. They are based on an older version of Anychart, version 3.3. Although these charts are already nice, there are some problems with it. You can't do everything you want with it, you can't print for ex, in short they look fine but not great.
Anychart released a while ago Anychart 5 which not only looks a lot nicer, but it resolved the problems and it has a lot more possibilities and features! Below, on the left, a chart created in APEX by using one of the predefined examples and on the right, the chart in Anychart 5 format.

I hope the charts speak for themselves ;-)

Installation

You can install this integration kit in a couple of different ways. If you prefer to keep the original APEX installation intact, you can do that and copy the integration kit in another folder. That means you can use the Anychart 3.3 and Anychart 5 charts together (like on the site of us).
You can also overwrite the files that came with APEX (take a backup first!) and that should change all your charts (also existing ones) in Anychart 5 format.

In both cases you can still use the wizards in APEX to create the charts, but if you decided to not overwrite the files, you need to make a small change in the chart region to point to the right path where you installed your files. The integration kit was tested on APEX 3.x (0, 1) and database 10g, 11g and XE with both the http server and the Embedded PLSQL Gateway. However if you do find a problem, please let us now or write a mail to apex@anychart.com.

Under the hood

So what's happening? The Anychart 5 file format is in a very different format, so what we did is creating a translation file which converts the Anychart 3 xml into Anychart 5 xml. You'll see the 2DColumn.swf of the integration chart are really small, that's because only the translation is done there and then sent to the anychart.swf file in the format it recognizes.


Using the integration kit

You can keep using the wizards in APEX to create your chart. This integration kit is meant as a first step towards the full kit we are working on. All the current types of charts in APEX are already supported by this kit and more, like for ex the combined charts - like on the screenshot above-, but Anychart 5 can do a lot more. For the Dashboards and Gauges for ex, which are currently not yet a type in APEX, you would need to write some more code yourself.
The followup kit will also provide you with the possibility to create these types of charts (Dashboards, Gauges, Maps, Gantts) through a wizard or at least with writing as less code as possible. In the meanwhile we (Apex Evangelists) can provide you with consulting to create other types of charts.


Examples

A full set of examples can be found on this site. All types of charts are shown in the standard APEX format (without changing or making it nicer), in the middle (if you enable the checkbox) you'll find the exact same chart but using the integration kit (so no changes made there) and on the right you find the same chart but with a few changes that shows the potential of Anychart 5.
You can also view the source of the region, the chart and the series that are used.

Purchase

The integration kit comes with a trial version of the Anychart 5 .swf file. You can see it by the watermark. If you buy the full version from the Anychart website and replace the anychart.swf file that comes with the integration kit, the watermark will disappear.
The integration kit itself doesn't cost you any money, you only need to pay for the Anychart license. APEX users get a 15% discount by using the code: APEX15

Final thoughts

This integration kit came together by the partnership of Apex Evangelists and Anychart. I would like to thank the people at Anychart for their help in working on this.

My first live hockey game

On Tuesday I went to my first ever live hockey game. I didn't know what to expect when James said me he had tickets for the hockey game, but he told me hockey is pretty big in Canada.

I saw the game Calgary Flames against Toronto Maple Leafs, which Calgary won 4-3. They played for a full house, so the atmosphere was very nice. The Flames first got a goal against, but it didn't take long before they scored some nice goals and took the lead. During the game you get sometimes time-out for commercials, that was new for me (well all of this was new for me).

I must say I liked it very much! Hockey is such a fast game and there's always a certain tension in the air. Like for ex the last minute when it was 4-3 the Leafs played without goalie!

Seeing hockey live is so much more fun than watching it on tv.

Players on the field, big screen tv's to watch the replays, real flames when goals were scored... everything for a fantastic evening.

Damn, APEX Page deleted! What now?

You know that feeling when you're working hard on a system, did a lot of changes, finally get the required result and start clean up old code?

I was in that stage... but then it went wrong: I deleted the wrong components and even some pages...

So what do you do then? What would you do in a not-APEX development environment? Getting an old file back, but what if you changed multiple files? Go back into source control and get the latest release? But are you using source control?

I was lucky as in APEX I could just Export my application as a few minutes ago. The below screen shows this feature to you.


Your database needs to have Flashback enabled for this, but who's database is not running in archivelog mode and has the flash recovery area enabled?

Maybe some of you didn't know about this possibility, it's definitely a nice one.

First time in Canada

I just arrived in Calgary where I'll have some meetings (around the use of APEX).

It's my first time in Canada. I didn't know what to expect, although I got slightly worried when I read a (bad) review about the hotel I'm staying in. But to be fair, the Ramada hotel isn't that bad. The room is nice, but the hotel is a bit dead.


It's a bit too cold for me in Calgary (only 2 degrees), but I guess I can be lucky as the taxi-driver told me it can be -40 degrees over here! I didn't see much else yet, only 17 Avenue where I went to a famous bar/restaurant called Jack's.

APEX Views are so useful

Oracle Application Express is getting more and more popular. A lot of people started to use it, even by some who are no real developers. They use APEX because it's helping them to do their "real job". And as with a lot of these "at-the-side" applications, the app becomes bigger and other people are starting to use it. Of course they are lucky as APEX can scale very well, but being a non-developer they hit at a certain time the limits or their technical capabilities and interest to make it an enterprise application.

On one of our projects we have to rebuild such an existing APEX application. There are a lot of pages in the application. In the requirements document there are screenshots of regions which need to be available in the new system. As you can imagine it can take a while to find a certain region.

Luckily, APEX is repository based, so all information of the application you find in a table. To make life easier, the APEX development team created APEX views on top of the APEX tables. You can compare it with the Oracle database itself where you have views on top of the x$ tables.

If you go to the Utilities tab in APEX, you'll see the APEX Views button (see screenshot above). If you click on that you'll get a nice screen with all the APEX views. You can also search for a view, for ex. I searched to get all APEX views that contain 'region'.

If you click on for ex the APEX Application Page Regions icon, you get all the details of the view and you can query it from there. You'll see the columns with explanation:


You have the possibility to select which columns you want to see when you run the query, which where clause you want to add and the query that will be run when you hit the go button.

It saved me a lot of time to find the regions I had to search for. A repository based system like APEX has so many advantages...