Oracle APEX insideout

Many users will complain about their prints when they find out that their tables are spread over multiple pages, without repeating the headers. Most software will fix this automaticly, but not browsers. You can, however, fix this with some simple CSS:

<STYLE type="text/css">

THEAD { display: table-header-group; }

TFOOT { display: table-footer-group; }

</STYLE>

As posted earlier today on this blog, APEX version 4.0 just released. I went right to installing the new version on my Laptop where i was running XE database with APEX 3.2 for Demo applications.
In short, this is my conclusion:
- Migrating from APEX 3.2 to APEX 4.0 seems to be effortless and without any big problems.
- Tabular forms and the new templates seem to have a few small bugs.

APEX 4.0 has been announced and postponed for a long time now, but we have to wait no longer!

Today (June 23th 2010) Oracle has put out the official press message (http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/081370) that this version is now downloadable from their website.

This means that we can start exploring the final new feature list, check the migration issues and installation options. Needless to say that we will of course post the findings as soon as possible!

Problem:

From time to time you run into a situation where you want to collect information in the backend and send it to the frontend. If you want to set a message in PL/SQL code and pass it to APEX, then you can set a page item or an application item using apex_util.set_session_state, but not in trigger code or in procedures or functions that are called from a trigger. This causes a "can not commit or rollback in a trigger" error.

As of may 10th, the third and final early adopter release has gone live. Again new features have been added and bugs have been fixed. Some of the new features are:

Creating a custom template for APEX can be problematic when you are not a web designer or when you do not have a lot (or any) experience with HTML and CSS. There is a very easy way to design in a "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) way by using Adobe Photo-shop. In short it is nothing more then making a picture of how you want your application to look and slice it up into parts.

Here is a You-tube video that explains how to do this:

When creating a APEX application you will find that most of the times your client will have wishes concerning the layout of the application that you cannot implement using a default APEX template. This is logical since each company has its own style in placement, standard objects and colouring. Especially applications that are rented out to other companies (also known as the SaaS principle) will provide challenges on this level of application development.

Each application where users can be separated by specific roles uses privileges to determine whether or not the user has the rights to access a certain page or function.
APEX gives several options on how to implement Authorisation. Think about conditional display, build options and validations. All of these option however, are not making it easy to maintain the authorisations.
Therefore APEX offers the developer to create Authorisation Schemes that simply return a FALSE or TRUE to state if the current user has the privilege.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a web technology enabling the user to subscribe to a source of information. For example, a user might be interested in the latest news headlines. His favorite news website provides a feed with the latest headlines using RSS. By using the feed in RSS-reader software, the user can quickly get a overview of the latest headlines. Also he can get notified when a new article is published. As RSS is just another XML standard, APEX is capable of generating one.

The 23rd of March Oracle organizes a day for the Oracle usergroup of the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg). Different speakers will talk about topics in all fields of the Oracle software. On this day our Blogger 'Bart Meijer' will be one of the speakers. He will show together with a Client how they used Oracle Application Express in a worldwide organisation to meet a very special demand.