As some of you may know I attended the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference a few weeks ago. BTW, a really great developer focused conference! Beside attending I also had to give two presentations. Trying out some software on my MacBook Pro, I recorded these two sessions. Continue reading
Category Archives: Tips & Tricks
Checkboxes in Tabular Forms – The easy way!
As you may know, Tabular Forms are sometimes let’s say “a little bit tricky”. They are missing some common features which are available for Page Items. One of them is the declarative support for Checkboxes. With the following step by step instruction you will be able to add checkboxes in Tabular Forms without loosing the existing wizard generated functionality.
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Number of displayed Records of Oracle APEX Popup LOV
Recently I answered a question about where to change the number of displayed records of a Popup LOV in Oracle APEX and I thought it could be of general interest.
The behavior of Popup LOVs can be changed through the Popup Lov template. You can find it at
Shared Components\Templates\Popup LOV.
In the Pagination section you will find the property Display which defines how many records are displayed at once.
The Popup LOV template also contains other interesting settings like the icon which is used for the popup lov field or the text for the search button, the width and height which is used to display the popup lov window and much more. Just have a look!
Overlapping labels in an Oracle APEX pie chart
Ever had the problem of overlapping labels in a pie chart which you used in an Oracle Application Express (APEX) application? Have a look at Gary Myers excellent tip to avoid collisions by using analytic functions to sort the data. It’s another great example of using the built-in power of the Oracle database.
ORA-02014: cannot select FOR UPDATE from view with DISTINCT, GROUP BY, etc.
If you get an ORA-02014: cannot select FOR UPDATE from view with DISTINCT, GROUP BY, etc. from your DML process when you submit the changes in an Oracle APEX application, then this is because Oracle APEX tries to lock the effected record before it updates/deletes it. This behavior was introduced in Oracle APEX 3.0, but with the side effect that complex updateable views with an instead of trigger get the above error.
Undocumented option for Static List of Values
Did you know that the STATIC and STATIC2 keyword used to define Static List of Values for Oracle Application Express (APEX) contains an undocumented option?
The online help documents the usage with
STATIC[2]:Display Value[;Return Value],Display Value[;Return Value]
But what to do if one of your values contains the semi colon or the comma in the text? You will get a problem with the predefined separators!
In such a case you can use
STATIC[2](lov-entries-sep,display-return-sep)isplay Value[<display-return-sep>Return Value] <lov-entries-sep>Display Value[<display-return-sep>Return Value]
For example:
STATIC2(~,*):Cat, Dog*1~Nemo, Shark*2
Remote debugging of an Oracle APEX application
If you ever wanted to remote debug the PL/SQL code which is called during execution of an Oracle APEX application, then have a look at the May/June issue of the Oracle Magazine. David Peake wrote an article titled The Power of Two on how to use SQL Developer to do that. On the German Oracle APEX Community Web-Site you will find a similar how-to in German.
Update: In Oracle APEX 3.1.1 there will be a new debug mode called REMOTE to enable remove debugging in Oracle APEX without having to modify the application. See the related posting on the OTN Forum.
Oracle APEX: Got a 404 Not Found?
Maybe you also already got the 404 Not Found error message
The requested URL /pls/apex/wwv_flow.accept was not found on this server.
when you submit an Oracle APEX page, …
There are a lot of reasons why this error can occur. But the above error message doesn’t tell you a lot about the root cause of the problem. The real error message can be found on your Apache Web server in the Apache\Apache\logs\error_log.xxxxx file. There you will find and entry like
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More undocumented new features in Oracle APEX 3.1
In one of my last posting I wrote about some undocumented new features in Oracle APEX 3.1, but there are more of them. I’m really short with my time, because I have to pack and get ready for my vacation, but Continue reading
"Comment out" an Oracle APEX Process, Validation, Branch, …
Sometimes during development there is the requirement to “Comment out” a Process, a Validation, … in an Oracle Application Express (APEX) application. To skip a step which doesn’t work anymore, or where a user says he doesn’t need that anymore but where you are sure that next week you are going to add it again…
In Oracle Forms that’s quite simple. You just have to rename the trigger to use underscores (eg. PRE-QUERY to PRE_QUERY) and the trigger doesn’t fire anymore. But how can you do that in Oracle APEX?