As promised on Saturday, I had a look at my existing plug-in tutorials, reworked them a little bit and have uploaded them so that you can try them out. There are in total five different tutorials for the different available plug-in types supported by Oracle Application Express 4.0. I ordered them based on there complexity. I would suggest that you process them in that order.
- Highlight (Dynamic Action)
- Masked Text Field (Item Type)
- Simple Google Map (Region Type)
- Get data (Dynamic Action) – with AJAX callback
- Group Selectlist (Item Type) -> advanced LOV definition processing
Plugin-HowTos.zip contains all the necessary files to get you started. If you want to have a look at more plug-ins or just want to try them out, get my Plug-in Sample Application and install it into your APEX 4.0 Early Adopter Workspace. The plug-ins can be found in Shared Components – Plug-ins.
Have fun playing with plug-ins and I’m looking forward to your feedback and enhancement requests 
December 21st, 2009 at 21:14
Great Work !
Plugins are big fun and make millions of new things possible. I’m digging in right away and work on my first plugin.
Peter
December 22nd, 2009 at 14:51
tried the highlight plug-in; was able to create the plug-in, but when i tried to upload the highlight.js file i got:
ORA-01407: cannot update (”APEX_040000″.”WWV_FLOW_PLUGIN_FILES”.”MIME_TYPE”) to NULL
Unable to process row of table WWV_FLOW_PLUGIN_FILES.
any ideas?
December 22nd, 2009 at 14:58
… i was using IE 6.0 (client required) — could that be the problem?
December 22nd, 2009 at 22:40
Dumb question: Does your Plug-in Sample application use all of the plug-in types in the How-To? I’m not sure I know where to look for them when I run it. I mean, I see the Plug-ins menu tab and the two maps are cool, but what about the other plug-in types?
Thanks,
Stew
December 22nd, 2009 at 23:06
Oops, found my answer with just a little looking through the application (Shared Components->Plug-ins) where I can see exactly where you use the plug-ins you wrote the How-tos for!
Sorry for the dumb (lazy?) question!
Some very cool stuff happening here! I especially like the Get-Data plug-in! It’s a whole lot easier to write the query for that than to write all the Javascript it usually requires!
December 28th, 2009 at 06:54
Hi Patrick,
I get the folowing error mes when installing your demo app:
ORA-20001: GET_BLOCK Error. ORA-20001: Execution of the statement was unsuccessful.
ORA-20001: Error creating branch id="860762340250241075"
ORA-30036: unable to extend segment by 8 in undo tablespace ‘UNDOTBS1′ <pre>begin wwv_flow_api.create_page_branch( p_id=>793704207557714686 + wwv_flow_api.g_id_offset, p_flow_id=> wwv_flow.g_flow_id, p_flow_step_id=> 7, p_branch_action=> ‘P7_BRANCH’, p_branch_point=> ‘AFTER_PROCESSING’, p_branc
Kind regards
Johannes
December 28th, 2009 at 15:41
Thanks for reporting this issue. It has been fixed.
December 29th, 2009 at 07:52
Hi Patrick,
Oracle fixed the problem after I raised a a bug in the feedback in http://tryapexnow.com , or was it my post here
Thanks for your fantastic tutorials.
Johannes
December 31st, 2009 at 11:17
It was both
Patrick
February 5th, 2010 at 22:05
Hi Patrick,
Exploring APEX4.0 has been exciting. Thanks for the good work done in APEX development team.
I want to highlight a text field based on the color chosen from select list item. I created a select list P1_COLOR with Green, Red, Yellow and text item P1_TEXT. In dynamic action on P1_COLOR, how do I specific value of P1_COLOR for the Color attribute?
Thanks
Kishore
February 7th, 2010 at 01:59
I tried to create your highlight plugin and use in the sample application but it failed. I believe APEX 4.0 changed after you created it. It did not match step 32 forward. So when I tested it, I got an error. Also step 16 and 20 assigning List values differs too.
February 9th, 2010 at 11:07
Hi Robert,
yes some of the names in the How To do not match with the actual UI. That has already been fixed and I will republish the How To when we refresh our EA instance.
BTW, you can use my plug-in sample application to get a working copy of the Highlight plug-in.
Regards
Patrick
February 9th, 2010 at 11:10
Hi Kishore,
using the current value from the browser is a little bit more difficult, because the existing dynamic actions use static values of values from the browser. You have two options:
1) Create 3 dynamic actions on P1_COLOR where you have a condition for each color and use that color as fixed value in your dynamic action to set the color.
2) Create just one dynamic action and use the Javascript action with the following code:
apex.jQuery.apex(’#P1_TEXT’).attr(’color’, $v(’P1_COLOR’));
Regards
Patrick
February 11th, 2010 at 15:32
Hello Patrick, i tried to import your plugin_sample_app.sql file into the early adopter release of apex 4.0.
In the workspace of tryapexnow there comes the error
“File is not a valid Application Express plug-in export file.”
I used different charsets to import the file but the error message above always comes at the point when i try to install it.
Thx so far for your tips.
February 11th, 2010 at 17:21
Ok i solved the problem, i checked the file and saw that it was no plugin file. The Application works fine.