Oracle Apex Notebook

Report columns that don't wrap

Written by Paulo Vale on Saturday, September 29, 2007

Have you ever had a tabular report where in an unwanted way a column breaks into two lines? That break can turn a nice report into an ugly unreadable report. For instance a date column with the day and month in the first line and the year in the second line. Bad, right?

There are several ways to avoid this, but simpler is adding "white-space: nowrap" to the CSS Style in the report column formating, like you can see in the picture.

Apex: the near future

Written by Paulo Vale on Saturday, September 22, 2007

In the next weeks Apex will have an upgrade (3.1) and a new version (4.0) is just around the corner. In the newly published Apex Statement of Direction, are some clues that I've also seen in this Michael Hichwa document I found at Dietmar Aust Blog.
From the new functionalities expected for the 3.1 upgrade, I am very curious about the "PL/SQL API to manage a runtime installation of Application Express".

But the best is reserved to the 4.0 version. New promised and amazing features will be available as we can see in the recently published Carl Backstrom Apex 4.0 preview video. The new query report region using Ajax is just fabulous. The tabular form validations, one of the most wanted features asked in Oracle Apex Forums will also be available in this version.
I'm glad to see that Apex Team is still motivated to bring Apex to a higher level. As I said, new announced functionalities are just amazing and yet, more to come. Can't wait to get my hands into the 4.0 version.

Substitution string and SQL Developer

Written by Paulo Vale on Friday, September 21, 2007

I use a substitution string in my applications to set the system path to my images. I call it MYFILES. Sometimes I create procedures and functions referring this substitution string to generate HTML code like this example:

IMG SRC="&MYFILES.image.gif"

Today I was trying to create a procedure in SQL Developer (another Oracle great tool) using that substitution string, but I got a problem with & character because its presence was interpreted as a substitution variable. I've noticed that SQL Developer even when the '&' is in a comment it is being interpreted as a substitution variable.
The solution to bypass this problem was using this simple command at the top of the code:

SET SCAN OFF

Here you can see that this command is considered obsolete and it was substituted by the SET DEFINE command. Worked for me.

The time has come...

Written by Paulo Vale on Friday, September 21, 2007

Hi, my name is Paulo Vale. I'm co-founder and development director at neoface, a portuguese software company. Neoface is an Oracle partner since 2005.
In this blog I will try to expose some of the experience I have in Oracle Apex. I started developing web applications using this Oracle tool about two years ago. I've learned very much reading some good Apex Blogs out there, so maybe it's time for me to contribute.
The time as come for me to have a blog :)