Oracle Apex Notebook

ORA-01403 when viewing BLOB data in a report (APEX)

Written by Paulo Vale on Friday, October 31, 2008

This post is almost a note to myself but I hope to help others when you Google for this little problem.

One of the features introduced with Oracle Apex 3.1 is the Declarative BLOB support. About this subject there is already a good article on Oracle By Example (OBE) site: Defining and Viewing BLOB Data in Oracle Application Express 3.1.

Last Friday I lost almost an hour just to have a simple classic report with an image column. I was getting a ORA-01403 error because simply I wasn't referencing the Table Primary Key in my SQL Query!

<br /> report error:<br /> ORA-01403: no data found<br />

These are the steps needed to have the image column successfully displayed:

Report Source Query
Important Tip: You must include the Primary Key column in your query.

<br /> SELECT my_id, DBMS_LOB.getlength ("MY_LOGO") my_logo<br /> FROM my_table;<br />

Report Column Attributes

Format Mask Attributes
Important Tip: Database table and column names are case sensitive.

Tabular Form Element
Include the reference to the Schema, Table and Blob Column.

What I miss the most in interactive reports

Written by Paulo Vale on Monday, July 21, 2008

I'm obliged to say that the Interactive Report Regions is one of the best features in APEX. The possibilities are huge. It's like passing the power to the end users.



A few days ago, I've posted about IRR having an upgrade in the next APEX release. The feature is being called as websheets. The possibility of having a tabular form with inline edit combined with the actual IRR features it's a "just can't wait" functionality.



Still, Interactive Reports are not perfect :) There are some functionalities I miss from the classic reports. I know that I can still use the classic reports, and I do use them many times, but having the possibility I tend to use the IRR as much as I can.



One of the functionalities I miss the most from classic reports is the possibility of being based on a function returning a query. This adds the possibility of a report being dynamically based on different tables or views and having dynamic where clauses. One of the situations where this is very useful is if you want to build a report wizard system in your application.

Also important, would be the possibility to have control over the report template and CSS, something similar to what we have in APEX classic reports.

Partial Page Request Reports

Written by Paulo Vale on Thursday, April 03, 2008

Last December I wrote a post about Turning a Report into PPR Report, making some changes in report template.

PPR means Partial Page Request, in other words, you can navigate your report records without needing to submit the whole page.

With the last APEX update, in case you havent noted yet, this feature option is already added to the report properties, so you don't need to change report template anymore.

To enable it, go to the report region properties and change to "Report Attributes" tab, "Layout and Pagination" section and change "Enable Partial Page Refresh" to Yes.



Have fun.

Reset region pagination via URL

Written by Paulo Vale on Monday, January 28, 2008

As you probably know :) you can create links between pages in your application using the following syntax:

f?p=App:Page:Session:Request:Debug:ClearCache:itemNames: itemValues:PrinterFriendly

The ClearCache argument sets the value of items to null. Here you can specify items, pages or even entire application to clear the cached value. There is another thing you can do: the keyword RP resets region pagination on the requested page.