Learn how to accelerate the development process by using the new Session Overrides APEX feature and one of the Visual Studio Code extensions. What is Session Overrides Session Overrides are a convenient way for developers to quickly change values in the session that the APEX engine is typically responsible for, like File Paths, Additional Files and Globalization Attributes. Here is the official documentation. Okay, but how do Session Overrides speed up the development process? They speed it up because it allows using a local JS or CSS files on your machine which are referenced in the app ..read more

See how I combined the APEX Geocoded Address item, several map layers, GeoJSON, SDO_UTIL and SDO_GEOMETRY packages to find nearest stadiums around The use case In this article, I will show you a solution for a situation that I often have while travelling abroad – finding the nearest stadium around me to watch some sports game. What I used is some native APEX functionality, available since version 21.2 – the new Maps region and the Geocoded Address item. The Maps region allows us to have several different layers inside, as the ones I have in my app are: Map Search – containing the location I ..read more

Comparing the APEX built-in Geocoded Address item with third party APIs for getting the best search results. Geocoding and Reverse Geocoding – what is that? Geocoding is the process of taking an address or location and converting it to latitude and longitude geographic coordinates. Reverse Geocoding is the opposite – the process that takes a latitude and longitude and converts it to an address or place such as (City, State, County, Zip etc.). Read this short post if you want the long description or this Wikipedia article to learn more about the history of the Geocoding. APEX and Geocoding ..read more

In this (and the next) blog posts I will demonstrate different techniques for validating user input in Oracle APEX. I bet you needed to validate an item – for example if the user has entered a valid e-mail address, a valid number, a valid name or phone number, a valid license plate, personal id number – you name it. Read how you can achieve that using the APEX built-in functionalities, using third party Javascript libraries or simply by using CSS and HTML attributes. After I demonstrate all the options you can check the chart with pros and cons and decide for yourself which type of validation ..read more

Learn more about the different Layer Types and Geometry Data Types used in the Maps region and why it’s important to know them all Why do you need to read this post? Having knowledge of the different types that represent a geometry can give you the opportunity to visualise more and highly complex geometries on your APEX Maps. Furthermore, at the end of this article you will know where each type has its best usage and how to convert data from one type to another. For me personally, this blog post is a way to better understand all the benefits we get by using the APEX Map Region on top of Oracle ..read more

I hate it when I can’t remember how I did certain thing in the past. And I have to spend precious time “reinventing the wheel” as the famous saying states. One of those things is conditionally change the text colour or background colour of certain cells in APEX Reports (Classic Report, Interactive Report or Interactive Grid). That’s why I will do my homework and put my notes here, hopefully saving some of your precious time too. Anatomy of a Report cell In this blog post I’m describing some methods of styling report cells in APEX. But APEX has three types of reports – the Classic Report, Inte ..read more

Did you ever needed a chat region for your Oracle APEX application? There is actually a Classic Report Comments template that produces almost that. With few simple steps you can turn Comments template into a real chat. Follow the steps below to create an excellent Chat region in APEX using just built-in components and a pinch of CSS. Turn Comments into a Chat Classic Report with Comments Template Slightly modified SQL query, specifying which message are your own and which are not A special CSS class, assigned to the Classic Report, which will be used for styling it Here are the settings fo ..read more

With version 22.1 of APEX, along with the many more top features, comes the ability to upload and modify your Application icon. If you have read my blog post Quick Tips: Add favicon and custom Application icon in APEX, I described the way I do it prior to having this new option available. Well, you can still follow my steps, but if you work with version 22.1 just save your time and use the built-in option. It not just allows you to upload and resize your own image as an Application icon while creating the app, but also allows you to modify it later using some new regions, added into the ..read more

With the new version (21.2) of APEX, came the built-in PWA support for your APEX applications. PWA stands for Progressive Web App and is a concept that allows your Web Application (an APEX app) to look like a Native App (an iOS or Android app). This includes local resources caching (like Javascript and CSS files), ability to install the app on any device, can be configured to push notifications and you can use it offline. One of the biggest benefits is that PWA needs a single codebase, so you only develop your app once and it’s ready for all devices, and a downside is that you don’t have full ..read more

One of the things, often overlooked and missed in projects is good documentation. Benefits of having such are obvious, but many times developers simply skip it, because of the lack of time or managing multiple projects at a time. That’s why I think that documenting should go along with the development and be a continuous process, not a one-off task. In this blog post I am going to demonstrate several ways of auto-generated documentation out of your PL/SQL packages, which can be easily implemented and maintained. And most importantly – make the process a lot friendlier and not time consuming ..read more