APEX: Show Actions menu with Authorization

With an Interactive Report you can choose whether you want the Actions Menu to be shown or not. This has to be done by the developer. Of course the customer wanted to have this based upon the existing authorization scheme. How can you solve this? Dynamic Actions to the rescue.

Comparing Schemas: Red Gate Schema Compare for Oracle

This week I attended a webinar by Cary Millsap, organized by Red Gate. It was called "Real Developers DO use Tools" and was focussed on, well, tools. At the end of Cary's talk, James Murtagh showed a demo of their Schema Compare tool. The demo wasn't flawless, but he recovered nicely :) (note to self: don't do live demo's). And this - the demo, not the occuring error - triggered a memory that I wanted to write a blog on the Schema Compare tool. If you missed the webinar you can find it on the website of Red Gate here: http://www.red-gate.com/products/oracle-development/deployment-suite-for-oracle/webinars/webinar-archive I had the pleasure of meeting James Murtagh during the UKOUG annual conference at the end of last year. James also hosts the All Things Oracle site. While we were discussing different topics (even non-oracle) he asked me which tool is my "development tool of choice". The tool I use predominantly is PL/SQL Developer by Allround Automations. "We have a plugin for that",... time to take a closer look at the tool.

Upgrade Oracle XE from 10 to 11: A word of caution

Finally I had some time to upgrade my Oracle XE database from version 10 to version 11, something I wanted to try out but could never find the time to do it. I wanted to try it out, to see if it all worked as advertised, usually it does. This time however I ran into some problems with the export and import of the APEX applications, good thing it was just on my sandbox database.

APEX: Friendlier exception message from AJAX call

While it is very easy to create a "Form and a Report" on a single table (or view), just follow the wizard, for end users it is not always intuitive that they should navigate to the form page to remove the record. A nicer solution is the one described by Anthony Rayner in this demo page. This solution uses a number of -very simple- dynamic actions to include a little trashcan on the report page.

Generate multiple rows

For the first post of the year, one of my New Year's resolutions is to write more posts than last year which shouldn't be too hard, I wanted to collect some different ways of generating multiple records. Sometimes I need, for whatever reason, generate multiple records. These are a few different ways of doing so.

Looking back at UKOUG 2011

Now that the UKOUG annual conference in Birmingham is over, it's time to write my thoughts down. As this was the second time that I attended the UKOUG conference, I already knew that it is a big conference. Lots of great speakers and a very good agenda. On the agenda were very interesting session, sometimes making it very hard to choose which session to go to. Guess you can't complain about that.

APEX: Make a report row clickable in Report

When you create a "Report with Form", there will be an icon in the report which allows you to navigate to  the form page. Only when the user clicks the icon this navigation will take place. For the current project, this was not what they wanted. They wanted to click on the row instead of just the icon. This can be simply implemented using jQuery.