Bar Solutions WebLog

On October 27th and 28th the combined OPP (Oracle PL/SQL Programming) and APEXposed conference is coming to Europe. To Brussels to be exact. I have had the privilege to attend these conferences since the first one in 2005. The nice thing about this conference is that it is the only conference (at least that I know of) that is totally focused on PL/SQL. Three tracks with all kinds of ideas of what you can do in PL/SQL. From using collections (been around since Oracle 7) to Edition Based Redefinition (Oracle 11Gr2).
If there is a slot in the agenda that has nothing you like, you are welcome to switch to the APEXposed conference to see if there is something you like.
I know I am a big fan of PL/SQL since it has nothing to do with building a front-end but more with getting the job done, using as less resources as possible and applying the best techniques available in the version I am working with.
I am not much of a visual developer. But using APEX, even I can make nice applications that are easy to build and even look nice.
Shameless plug: I will also be doing a presentation on my favorite tool PL/SQL Developer. If you attend the conference, I hope you will come and see this.

On my new job we wanted to provide some logging. Especially about what program is currently running. Of course it would be easy enough to add a line at the start of the program with the name of that program and one at the end. But, as things go during development, names (and types) of programs tend to change and we would have to change those lines accordingly. Something that can (and will) be easily forgotten.

Why not have the code tell us where we are. That way we wouldn’t have to change our code if the program name changes. But unfortunately there is no such thing as a function to tell me where I am.

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The other day someone at a customer had a question about displaying a report. The different options are in a table so he could easily use a report to display the options. But he wanted to display three columns of options. That is, if there are 10 options, he would want to display 3 rows of 3 options and a single row of 1 option.

should be displayed as:

How can this be done. The answer is in the query.

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When building code to support your APEX application, it is always nice to be able to generate large parts of that code. I am really fond of creating code using the QDA. The only trouble is that you need to create all the packages separately. What I have found works for me is to create a single script for the sequence, all the packages and the trigger creation. This is something that had to be done by hand because QNXO generates separate files for the different parts of the Table API. Continue reading »

I have been playing around with Apex 4.0 on http://tryapexnow.com. When playing around with some ideas I have for application I decided to use the logging mechanism I created a while ago, to see what’s going on in the custom code.
Since this is a hosted environment it is not too easy to check the records in the log. There were a couple of queries needed to check the log. I usually run these from my IDE, but the is not possible now. They can be easily run using the SQL Workshop, but I have APEX at my disposal. So why not create a simple application to display the information in the log table. But if I create an application and start using it, it becomes publicly available and everybody can see what’s being logged (including the values of parameters). I need some sort of authentication here.
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