Blog Archive

  • Building a Mini SQL Workshop #JoelKallmanDay

    Two new features in APEX 22.2 let me easily create a Mini SQL Workshop app. Users type any query in a code editor and instantly visualize the resulting data. I wired my colleague Ronny Weiss’ Monaco Code Editor region plug-in to a new CLOB-valued page item to support editing the SQL query. A dynamic action reacts to the code editor save event to refresh the new Dynamic Content region to show the query’s results. For an interesting twist, the database’s native support for XML and XSLT produces the HTML markup for the dynamic content region rather than looping over data…

  • Managing Intersection Rows with Drag & Drop

    Overview After publishing my last article about reordering cards using clicks, Peter Raganitsch suggested on Twitter that I try the same use case using drag and drop with the free FOS – Drag and Drop plugin. While exploring the idea, I expanded the use case to more closely resemble my conference organizer app where each yearly edition of a conference can have a different “lineup” of speakers. So I introduced a Lineup table into the sample app’s data model and document here how I created a page to reorder the employees in one or more lineups, including the ability to…

  • Reordering Cards Using Clicks

    Sometimes your data needs to be explicitly ordered rather than sorted by an intrinsic property like a name, salary, or hire date. In these cases we introduce an additional number column like SORT_SEQUENCE into the data model and sort on that manually-assigned position number. For a volunteer project I’m working on, I needed the ability to explicitly order the speakers at a conference, and easily adjust it as the organizer moves speakers around in the lineup. Before implementing the feature in my actual application, I built a simpler example based on employee names first to get the basic idea working.…

  • Using Scriptable DevOps to Save Time

    While developing an APEX app, I check my latest changes into a Git repository after reaching a feature milestone. In this article I’ll explain how I took advantage of APEX’s scriptable devops features to automate multiple steps in my daily workflow that I had previously been doing manually. The result are two simplified commands: In case the scripts could be useful to you to study or use, I’ve included a link to download the source at the end of the article along with a short video that illustrates how I use these commands in my daily work. My Workflow Before…

  • SmartFiltering Multiple Regions

    A fellow Oracle employee wielding the power of APEX to solve an internal business problem for her team asked an interesting question on our internal discussion forum this week. Her app shows resources partitioned into three categories in side-by-side cards regions. She wanted to use a single SmartFilter region to filter the results showing up in these three regions, each based on the same underlying table with a slightly different WHERE clause. Wherever possible, my brain tends to map questions onto the familiar EMP and DEPT tables to simmer a question down to its essence. So I imagined side-by-side cards…