Blog Archive

  • Custom Outcomes with Action Tasks

    Approval Tasks in your APEX workflows have two built-in outcomes, either APPROVED or REJECTED. If your flow needs custom outcomes, use an Action Task with an updateable task parameter instead. The sample app in this article lets the user assigned to the task click an (X), (Y), or (Z) button to indicate their custom response. Then the workflow uses Switch activities to perform different work depending on the task outcome. The sample app you can download from here contains a home page that lets you start a workflow, and delete any development workflows you might have created for testing. Additional Wizard-Created…

  • Builder + App Side-by-Side in Chrome

    In the latest Google Chrome release (143.0.7499.41) a new Split View feature is handy for Oracle APEX developers. It lets you run APEX Builder and your runtime app side-by-side in the same tab. Here’s how to use it. NOTE: To see a larger version of any image, right-click on it an open it in a new tab at full size. Split View: Builder + App Start by running your application to open it in a second tab… With the Builder tab active, hover over the tab of your running application and right-click on it. Choose the New Split View with…

  • Server-Side Geocoding & AI-Driven Point of Interest Lookup #joelkallmanday

    In APEX on Autonomous Database, use declarative, server-side geocoding to find coordinates for an address. Then you can see it on a map, measure its distance from another point, find it within a radius, and process it with other spatial data features. Use an AI Configuration to create a smart web service with natural language. It taps into a large-language model’s knowledge to return a structured result. To celebrate Joel Kallman Day 2025, we study an app that combines the two. It lets a user enter an address, then in the background finds its coordinates and whether it represents a well-known…

  • Sanitizing HTML Server-Side

    A colleague asked how he might sanitize client-submitted HTML to remove potential Cross-Site Scripting vulnerabilities. His use case was an ORDS REST service accepting HTML content, so he wanted to sanitize it using PL/SQL. After consulting the functions in the APEX_ESCAPE package, I convinced myself we needed a different strategy. The functionality could also come in handy for an APEX application, so I set out to implement a proof of concept solution. Using XSL Transformations Earlier in my career, I represented Oracle on the XSL Transformations working group at W3C. XSLT is an elegant, declarative standard to describe a transformation of…

  • Including User Input in AI Prompt

    Sometimes it can be useful to include end-user input in a generative AI system prompt. You can do this with both the Generate Text with AI dynamic action, as well as the Show AI Assistant one. We’ll explore two simple APEX 24.2 sample apps that illustrates the respective techniques. Generating Text with AI from User Input Imagine you want to let a user find synonyms using a large language model. This is a simple use case for the Generate Text with AI dynamic action, and requires including the original word the user wants alternatives for in the system prompt. As…