Oracle Apex Notebook

One year blogging

Written by Paulo Vale on Sunday, September 21, 2008

Yes, that is right. This blog is one year old.

I thank all of you out there for coming around, reading what I want to say about APEX. Thanks a ton. I hope you will stick with me for the next year too.

Top 10 of most visited posts:

Check all checkboxes
Javascript Calendar Integration
Colorful web forms
Javascript Tooltip Integration
Substitution string and SQL Developer
Populate date field using javascript
Nice filter region template
Translating internal messages used by APEX
Turn Report into PPR Report
A real live APEX application

Most commented posts:

Javascript Tootip Integration
A real live APEX application
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San Francisco

Written by Paulo Vale on Sunday, September 21, 2008

I’m in San Francisco for the Oracle OpenWorld 2008 where I’ll be participating in one of the official sessions under the title “Building Commercial Software-as-a-Service Applications with Oracle Application Express”.

I’ve arrived yesterday around 6:30 PM after a tiring 18 hours long trip. I’ve started at Oporto Airport where I took a plain to Lisbon, then Philadelphia and finally San Francisco. As you can imagine, I’ve arrived completely exhausted.

It gets dark really soon in San Francisco. I took the BART to get to the city centre around 7 PM and it was completely dark outside.

After checking with the hotel, I took a short walk just to feel the city atmosphere and have a quick meal. The first impression I had was a nice, clean, organized, big city. Many people walking in the sidewalks, speaking numerous different languages. I’ve stopped some people to ask for directions and no one seemed to be from San Francisco… I guess San Francisco beyond an American city, it’s a World city. I’ve also noticed a bad thing: homeless people checking garbage cans and asking for money in the streets.

Today, the jetlag effect made me wake up at 2 AM. I forced myself to sleep a little bit more and managed to sleep until 5 AM. Considering that yesterday I woke up at 5:30 AM to start the travel and went to bed at 6:30 AM the next day (10:30 PM local time) I’ve been more than 24 h awake, excluding two or three small periods on the plain.

I have a full day with lots of sessions to follow and with the blogger meetup at the end of the day.

Keep checking this blog. I’ll try blog everyday during the OpenWorld.

Get server URL in Apex

Written by Paulo Vale on Monday, September 08, 2008

Some time ago, I had this requirement to send to the application end users, links to specific pages passing some parameters.

The problem was obtaining the full URL including the server's name and port where APEX was running.

The OWA_UTIL package contains utility subprograms for getting the value of environment variables. Specifically the OWA_UTIL.GET_CGI_ENV function returns the value of CGI environment variables, like REQUEST_PROTOCOL, HTTP_HOST, SERVER_PORT and SCRIPT_NAME, this last one to get the mod_plsql cartridge and the database access descriptor name.

Usage:

<br /> owa_util.get_cgi_env('REQUEST_PROTOCOL')<br /> owa_util.get_cgi_env('HTTP_HOST')<br /> owa_util.get_cgi_env('SERVER_PORT')<br /> owa_util.get_cgi_env('SCRIPT_NAME')<br />

You can quickly test these values creating a PL/SQL Dynamic Content region like this:

<br /> BEGIN<br />    HTP.p (   'Apex URL: '<br />           || OWA_UTIL.get_cgi_env ('REQUEST_PROTOCOL') || '://'<br />           || OWA_UTIL.get_cgi_env ('HTTP_HOST')        || ':'<br />           || OWA_UTIL.get_cgi_env ('SERVER_PORT')      || '/'<br />           || OWA_UTIL.get_cgi_env ('SCRIPT_NAME')      || '/'<br />          );<br /> END;<br />

Now to complete the URL you just need to append the well known f function with the right values. In case you have forget, here is the Apex f function URL Syntax:

<br /> f?p=App:Page:Session:Request:Debug:ClearCache:itemNames:itemValues:PrinterFriendly<br />

This blog in a cloud

Written by Paulo Vale on Friday, September 05, 2008

After reading this post by Jake Kuramoto, I was curious to see how Apex Notebook blog looks like in a word cloud. Here is the result:


Wordle is a service for generating word clouds from text sources like blog feeds. The words that appear more frequently in the source text are bigger in the final image.

Back to real life

Written by Paulo Vale on Monday, September 01, 2008

After 15 well deserved :) days of vacations in the sunny Algarve (south Portugal) I'm back to work. It is hard when I think that just two days ago I was at those wonderful beaches, eating fresh sea fish...

However, not everything went fine :( I just had one of the major sports disillusion, provoked by a bad referee decision.

I've just noticed that while I was away some things happened in the APEX world,  starting with the release of APEX 3.1.2 patch. Judging by the number of fixed bugs I think it is worthy to apply the patch. There are already reports saying everything went fine applying the patch.

A new version of OTN forums came out (again) but unfortunately there are still some problems. Fortunately there are people who can help us deal with some issues like the look and feel.