Blog Archive

  • Planning with Gantt & Calendar #JoelKallmanDay

    Overview Building an app to solve a personal need is a great learning opportunity. Sometimes I plan multi-day trips and must decide among overlapping events. The annual animation festival in Annecy, France, is one example. Hundreds of talks and screenings span various venues in a lovely little lakeside locale. Another is a periodic pilgrimage to New York City to see as many musicals and museums as I can fit in a week. An APEX app helps me plan my trip activities. This year I celebrate Joel Kallman Day by sharing my app and explaining the smorgasbord of APEX tricks I…

  • Only Unused Items in Grid LOV

    I saw an interesting question in the APEX discussion forum this morning asking how a Popup LOV in an interactive grid could show only the items that were not already referenced in the grid. It’s a question I’d asked myself multiple times before, but one whose answer I hadn’t researched until today… My solution combines a tip from my colleague Jeff Kemp’s article Interactive Grid: Custom Select List on each row with the get_ig_data plug-in that simplifies using pending grid data in SQL or PL/SQL. Fellow Oracle employee Bud Endress had mentioned the plug-in to me multiple times and I…

  • Multilevel Story Approvals

    Oracle APEX lets low-coders easily automate human approvals. With a bit of coordination logic, you can manage multi-step ones, too. Read on to learn how a company gets stories for their corporate website approved by all the required stakeholders before publishing. You’ll find the link to download and try the sample app at the end. Who Writes & Approves Stories? To make the sample app more realistic and interesting, we imagine a small widget-making company with a corporate web site. Each new story for the site needs a multi-step approval before publishing. The figure below shows the company’s eight colleagues.…

  • Parent/Child Validation Made Easy

    When working with parent/child data, an app often needs to validate an aggregate condition about all of the child rows related to a parent row. For example, say each teammate assigned to an action item can have a role of “Lead” or “Member”. Some typical parent/child validations for an action item’s team members might require the team to… Ideally, the app will refuse to save anything unless the pending changes to parent and child rows satisfy all 3 business rules. The app should show the user a message so they know what to fix before trying to save again. Starting…

  • Bulk Data Loading from a Zip

    A friend is learning APEX to automate his business mentoring athletes. In his practice, he captures training performance metrics, then needs to analyze clients’ progress toward their goals over time. His instruments record an athlete’s performance data in a comma-separated values (CSV) format. Recently, he asked if APEX could load data from a CSV file. After showing him how easy it was, he added another twist:”What if I have a directory full of CSV files, organized into subdirectories by athlete? After a week’s sessions with clients, there could be a lot of files. Will I have to import them one…