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I had recently attended OTN Database 12c Developer Day, at Bangalore. I must say it was very informative and gave me new insights on the new database unveiled recently by Oracle Corporation. Rather than focussing more about the event, I will focus what was being the agenda or what what I learned from this event. I must admit I am getting old because this cloud business is too hard to understand. You will agree with me if you see advertisements of cloud-ready, but are not able to understand anything beneath it. This event gave me the initial thoughts. Before 12c, Oracle databases supported multi-tenancy through VPD or FGAC (whatever you prefer to call it). To use this feature, your tables needed to have extra columns to identify a tenant when he is logging in to the database. So with a single database, you could (a big COULD) support multiple clients. But it was used not for this purpose (maybe oracle knew this before). Application developers took this feature to implement ...

This was one of my biggest concerns while using Oracle APEX. I will often enable PDF download from Interactive Report setup in a page, but the download was generating only a corrupt file. My google searches also did not yield any result. Then came the news that I have to install BI Publisher in order to use the feature. This message was floating in OTN forums related to this topic. I got disheartened learning this. Why would Oracle provide such a tool if it can't support PDF download by default. Then came the SOLUTION for the problem. In one of documentation available in Oracle's website I found the news I have been searching for a long time. The APEX download (4.2.2) had been shipped with a war file fop.war. This file is available in the folder  apex_4.2.2\apex\utilities\fop The installation instructions mentioned that I need to deploy this war file in OC4J but which requires  Oracle Containers for J2EE (10.1.3.2 or above) [I don't have a clue what this is]. ...

This mini tip is to help those who does not know CSS much and those who know CSS but do not know where to apply code in Oracle Apex. In Interactive reports by default the control panel items (filters/report titles) etc will be displayed one line below the other. If you have ten filters applied on an IR/Interactive Report then the panel when expanded occupies 10 lines in the report just like the one below: This mini tip will enable you to change this like the one below: If you have a Page 0/Global Page created within your application do not follow step 1. Step 1: Create a Global Page/Page 0 in your application. Step 2: Create a HTML region with template "No template" in this page. Step 3: Add the following CSS inside this region source and save. <style>   table#apexir_CONTROL_PANEL_COMPLETE tr{float:left;padding-right:15px;} </style> This is all you have to do to change Interactive report's control panels visibility option in your entire a...

You must follow the exact steps to add link to attachments in BLOB column in Interactive Report/IR in Oracle APEX: 1. Table must have primary key (I could not make this work with ROWID in View), and it must be queried in the select statement for IR. 2. In query one column must fetch size of attachment. You may use dbms_lob.getlength(blobcolumn) function to fetch the size. 3. In the size column added provide format mast as BLOB and in Apex 4.2.2 "BLOB Column Attributes" section will come. 4. In "BLOB Column Attributes" you must specify at least two columns, BLOB column in "Column" and "Primary Key column 1". If you have composite primary key, you may specify "Primary Key column 2". 5. If you are saving the file name in table, you may also identify the column name in "Filename Column" field. If you are getting " no data found " error in the region of Interactive report, do make sure that the first point mentio...

For educational purposes I had created a sample application. This application is intended to be used within an organization where a table tennis tournament is taking place. The requirements for the application were: There should be provision to create Team and Players (Only doubles tournament was conducted). Team & Players should be entered in Master-Detail format. Matches & Results data should be entered as a tabular format. Match Calendar should be shown. Reports like: Points tally Top 4 teams (who will qualify for semi-finals) The completed application can be downloaded from this link . The E-R diagram for the application (generated out from SQL Developer can be found below). To see more information on generating E-R diagram from SQL developer click here .

This is one of the most coolest feature I like about SQL Developer. I am using version 3.1.07 and this feature is available in this version. SQL Developer requires just the DDL scripts that I use for installation for the product and it generates the E-R diagram within seconds.

Till Apex 4.1 while creating a page you had an option for creating "Page Zero". This page type is a special master page to your application. If you add any element to this page, automatically the element will be displayed in all pages within your application.

I was reading about features in Oracle APEX 4.1 in Patrick Wolf's Blog, and I wanted to try it out to see how easy or difficult it is to implement a Select list which dynamically changes based on a different value in the page. I created a sample application with three tables: Country_Master - Stores country id and name State_Master - Stores country id, state id, and name Company_Master - references country id and state id to store company record. My intention was to implement country select list and state select list in company master page. As soon as I select a country states belonging to the country should be refreshed in state select list. The APEX feature used: " Cascading LOV Parent Item(s) "

Oracle's APEX is a RAD (rapid application development) tool which requires only a web browser like Google Chrome/Mozilla Firefox to develop and deliver "New Age" web based applications. Oracle allows a cloud based website apex.oracle.com to help ourselves familiarise this tool. As of this tutorial the version of APEX in the cloud is 4.2.2. In this cloud website one can apply for a free account. I am going to publish a series of videos helping you to get started with Oracle Apex. In this first of series I will be creating a free account with the cloud based website. Let's see how you can create your account: A simple introduction to Oracle APEX can be seen here .

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I was creating a custom function (for demo purposes) and was stumbled with this error. ORA-44004: invalid qualified SQL name I was referring to my code in APEX 4.0 which was calling the procedure as return f_validate; I was trying to do the same in APEX 4.2.1 also. But I was continuously bugged by this or some other error.

ORA-31011: XML parsing failed while calling srw.run_report from database Below is a sample report calling block I copied from Oracle Forums. There was a mistake in the block which was causing the error ORA-31011: XML parsing failed. The solution is simple. the GATEWAY parameter had a 'question mark' at the end of the link. If you see the output generated by srw.start_debugging, the URL framing would be listed there: http://192.168.50.53:7778/reports/rwservlet?&SERVER=rep_dev&report=rep_name&userid=user/pass@sid&destype=file&desformat=pdf&destination=/u01/&distribute=yes If you notice closely there is a & added before SERVER parameter. This is due to the presence of the ? SRW.ADD_PARAMETER of GATEWAY. If you remove the ? from the last of link the report will be invoked. DECLARE v_paramlist srw_paramlist; v_jobident srw.job_ident; v_status srw.status_record;  BEGIN srw.start_debugging; v_paramlist := srw_paramlist(srw_parameter('...

Oracle's Web Toolkit (HTP/HTF) supports creating webpages with full control. I have been using them for my official project and we have built a framework associated with a style sheet we have created. Among other things it supports uploading files by user. Using the HTML INPUT type="file" we can position the file selection dialog. The form needs to be open with multipart/form-data. For the first time if you are using this functionality you may have to configure the table name where Oracle populates the file in a BLOB column. The configuration is part of DAD , placed in Database server within / dbfolder /Apache/modplsql/conf/dads.conf file. " dbfolder " is where you have installed the database. In the Location tag specify a table for the attribute      PlsqlDocumentTablename MYDOCUMENTS A sample document table can consist of the following: CREATE TABLE [table_name] (   NAME VARCHAR2(256) UNIQUE NOT NULL,   MIME_TYPE VARCHAR2(128), ...