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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In Detail
Oracle Application Express 4.0 is a rapid web application development tool that works with the Oracle database. Using features like Plug-ins and Dynamic Actions, APEX helps you build applications with the latest techniques in AJAX and JavaScript.
The Oracle Application Express 4.0 Cookbook shows you recipes to develop and deploy reliable, modern web applications using only a web browser and limited programming experience.
With recipes covering many different topics, it will show you how to use the many features of APEX 4.0.
You will learn how to create simple form and report pages and how to enhance the look of your applications by using stylesheets. You will see how you can integrate things such as Tag Clouds, Google Maps, web services, and much more in your applications. Using Plug-ins, Dynamic Actions, BI Publisher, translations and Websheets, you will be able to enhance your applications to a new level in APEX.
This book will show you how to be Agile in the development of your web applications by using Team Development, debugging, and third-party tools.
After reading this book, you will be able to create feature-rich web applications in Application Express 4.0 with ease and confidence.
A practical reference guide with over 70 recipes for every APEX developer
Approach
As a cookbook, this book enables you to create APEX web applications and to implement features with immediately usable recipes that unleash the powerful functionality of Oracle APEX 4.0. Each recipe is presented as a separate, standalone entity and reading of other prior recipes is not required.
It can be seen as a reference and a practical guide to APEX development.
Who this book is for
This book is aimed both at developers new to the APEX environment and at intermediate developers. More advanced developers will also gain from the information at hand.
If you are new to APEX you will find recipes to start development. If you are an experienced user you will find ways to work smarter and more easily with APEX and enhance your applications.
A little knowledge of PL/SQL, HTML and JavaScript is assumed.
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Seitenzahl: 358
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010
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Table of Contents
Oracle APEX 4.0 Cookbook
Oracle APEX 4.0 Cookbook
Copyright © 2010 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: December 2010
Production Reference: 1081210
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-849681-34-6
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Dan Anderson (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Authors
Marcel van der Plas
Michel van Zoest
Reviewers
Dimitri Gielis
Maarten van Luijtelaar
Surachart Opun
Development Editor
Maitreya Bhakal
Technical Editor
Neha Damle
Indexers
Monica Ajmera Mehta
Rekha Nair
Editorial Team Leader
Gagandeep Singh
Project Team Leader
Priya Mukherji
Project Coordinator
Srimoyee Ghoshal
Proofreader
Aaron Nash
Graphics
Geetanjali Sawant
Production Coordinator
Shantanu Zagade
Cover Work
Shantanu Zagade
About the Authors
Marcel van der Plas has been an Oracle Consultant for over 15 years. And from the beginning, he learned to work with Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, and Oracle Designer. Marcel has worked on many projects with these tools. Later on, he became interested in APEX and did some projects with APEX.
Marcel currently works for Ciber. Other companies he worked for are Atos Origin and Whitehorses. For Whitehorses, he wrote some articles ("Whitebooks") about Oracle.
I would like to thank Michel van Zoest, my co-author for helping and working together. I also want to thank the reviewers Maarten van Luijtelaar, Dimitri Gielis, and Surachart Opun. Their comments were so valuable and helpful. I would like to thank Douwe Pieter van den Bos for introducing us to Packt and I would like to thank Packt for giving me this opportunity to write this book. I would like to thank my employer, Ciber, for giving me the freedom to write this book.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my wife Yvonne and my children Vera, Laura, and Joey for inspiring and supporting me. At the same time, I would like to apologize to them for not having time to play on the weekends during the months that I wrote this book.
Michel van Zoest is a consultant with more than 10 years of experience in building (web) applications using Oracle technology such as Oracle (web) Forms, Oracle Designer, MOD_PLSQL, ADF, SOA Suite and of course, APEX.
He is one of the first Oracle Application Express Developer Certified Experts in the world.
He has used his APEX knowledge in projects for companies ranging in size from a single employee to large multinationals. His experience in these projects has been used in the realization of this book.
Michel currently works at Whitehorses in the Netherlands and runs his own blog at http://www.aboutapex.com. Next to that, he blogs at the company website on http://blog.whitehorses.nl and he regularly writes Whitebook articles (in Dutch) for Whitehorses.
First of all, I would like to thank my co-author Marcel van der Plas. Thanks to the easy way that we could work together, the writing of this book has gone as smooth as possible.
I would like to thank the people at Packt Publishing for offering me the chance to write this book. It has been a long process with a lot of hard work, but I'm very happy with the result. I also would like to thank Douwe Pieter van den Bos for introducing me and Marcel to Packt and his invaluable help in the early stages of the book.
Furthermore, I would like to thank Maarten van Luijtelaar, Dimitri Gielis, and Surachart Opun for their hard work in reviewing our drafts. This book has become so much better thanks to you guys.
I also would like to thank my employer Whitehorses for the support I have been given.
And last but not least, I would like to thank my family for their love and support. Without the help of my wife Jamila and the "dikke kroelen" from my daughters Naomi and Aniek, this result would not have been possible.
About the Reviewers
Dimitri Gielis was born in 1978. Together with his family he lives in Leuven, Belgium.
At an early age, Dimitri started working with computers (Apple II, IBM XT) and he quickly knew he would like to work with computers and especially with databases all his life.
In 2000, Dimitri began his career working as a consultant for Oracle, Belgium where he got in touch with almost every Oracle product. His main expertise was in the database area, but at that time he was also exposed to HTMLDB, which was renamed Oracle Application Express later on. From the very start he liked the Oracle database and APEX so much that he never stopped working with it. Dimitri then switched to another company to create an Oracle team and do pre-sales, to later create and manage an Oracle Business Unit.
In 2007, Dimitri co-founded APEX Evangelists (http://www.apex-evangelists.com), together with John Scott. APEX Evangelists is a company which specializes in providing training, development, and consulting specifically for the Oracle Application Express product.
On his blog (http://dgielis.blogspot.com) he shares his thoughts and experience about Oracle and especially Oracle Application Express.
Dimitri is a frequent presenter at OBUG Connect, IOUG Collaborate, ODTUG Kaleidoscope, UKOUG conference, and Oracle Open World. He likes to share his experience and meet other people. He's also President of the OBUG (Oracle Benelux User Group) APEX SIG.
In 2008, Dimitri became an Oracle ACE Director. Oracle ACE Directors are known for their strong credentials as Oracle community enthusiasts and advocates.
In 2009, Dimitri received the "APEX Developer of the year" award by Oracle Magazine.
You can contact Dimitri at <[email protected]>.
Surachart Opun has been working with Oracle products for over six years. Surachart is co-founder for Oracle User Group in Thailand. He is Oracle ACE, OCE RAC, and OCP 10g/11g. He implemented, migrated, and operated about Oracle Products including Oracle Database, Application Express and so on. He contributes more about Oracle Products.
Blog: http://surachartopun.com
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Preface
Oracle Application Express 4.0 is a rapid web application development tool that works with the Oracle database. Using features like Plug-ins and Dynamic Actions, APEX helps you build applications with the latest techniques in AJAX and JavaScript.
The Oracle Application Express 4.0 Cookbook shows you recipes to develop and deploy reliable, modern web applications using only a web browser and limited programming experience.
With recipes covering many different topics, it will show you how to use the many features of APEX 4.0.
You will learn how to create simple form and report pages and how to enhance the look of your applications by using stylesheets. You will see how you can integrate things such as Tag Clouds, Google Maps, web services, and much more in your applications. Using Plug-ins, Dynamic Actions, BI Publisher, Translations, and Websheets, you will be able to enhance your applications to a new level in APEX.
This book will show you how to be agile in the development of your web applications by using Team Development, debugging, and third-party tools.
After reading this book, you will be able to create feature-rich web applications in Application Express 4.0 with ease and confidence.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Creating a basic APEX application, describes the basic steps to create an APEX application. We will learn to make an intranet application where employees can get information.
Chapter 2, Themes and Templates, presents some recipes which will make your application look better using themes and templates by creating your own theme, including images in it and so on.
Chapter 3, Extending APEX, shows us how to we will extend our application with some nice features like visual effects, a tag cloud, and a Google map.
Chapter 4, Creating Websheet Applications, teaches us how to create a websheet application, create a page in the application, add a navigation page to the websheet, and allow multiple users to access the websheet.
Chapter 5, APEX Plug-ins, describes the four types of plug-ins: Item type, Region type, Dynamic action, and Process type plug-ins.
Chapter 6, Creating Multilingual APEX Applications, shows us how we can fully translate an application using built-in functionality to translate applications, without having to rebuild the application completely and adding something of ourselves to easily switch between languages.
Chapter 7, APEX APIs, shows us how to use APIs as they offer a lot of flexibility and speed in developing web applications.
Chapter 8, Using Webservices, teaches us how to use webservices in APEX.
Chapter 9, Publishing From APEX, shows you how to export reports and get the output in some kind of digital format and how to interact with BI Publisher.
Chapter 10, APEX Environment, contains recipes that will show how to set up and use a development environment, how to use version control and how to deploy Application Express on a web container with the APEX Listener.
Chapter 11, APEX Administration, shows you how to create a workspace, how to create users on the workspace and how to manage the workspaces.
Chapter 12, Team Development, we will see how we can take advantage of the features in Team Development in our project. Each recipe will show how a part of Team Development can be put to use in a specific part of the project cycle.
What you need for this book
APEX 4.0 or higher.
Oracle RDBMS database 10.2.0.3 or higher.
Either one of the following Internet browsers:
Who this book is for
This book is aimed both at developers new to the APEX environment and at intermediate developers. More advanced developers will also gain from the information at hand.
If you are new to APEX you will find recipes to start development. If you are an experienced user you will find ways to work smarter and more easily with APEX and enhance your applications.
A little knowledge of PL/SQL, HTML and JavaScript is assumed.
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Chapter 1. Creating a Basic APEX Application
In this chapter, we will cover:
Introduction
This chapter describes the basic steps to create an APEX application. Using APEX, it is really simple to create a basic application. The user interface is web-based and very intuitive. A lot of objects can be created using wizards which will guide you through the creation process.
Our aim is to make an intranet application where employees can get information. When starting the application, it shows a homepage with information such as weather, traffic company information, latest news, blogs, and so on. Employees can see their colleagues' profiles, just like in Facebook. Employees also have access to documents like timesheets and project plans.
Creating an APEX 4.0 application
This recipe describes the tasks needed to create an APEX 4.0 application. You should have APEX 4.0 installed or have an account on Oracle's online APEX environment at http://apex.oracle.com and your web browser should be a modern browser like Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or higher or Mozilla Firefox 1.0 or later. The starting point is the Oracle Application Express home page:
How to do it...
You will see a page where you can choose between database applications or websheet applications. Furthermore, you see already created applications.
Click on the Create button on the right side of the screen. Two options are shown. You can now choose between a database application and a websheet application. We select the database application.In APEX you have two ways of selecting and proceeding to the next step most of the time. Usually, there is an icon accompanied by a radio button. When you check the radio button, you must click the Next button after that to proceed. When you click the icon, you automatically go to the next step. In this book, when there is the situation that you have to select one of the shown options, we will only tell which one of the options you should select. You can decide yourself which way to select and proceed.
Select Database. In the next step we can now choose between From Scratch, From Spreadsheet and Demonstration Application. When you choose Demonstration Application, Oracle APEX creates an application which shows the possibilities of APEX. However, we want to create an application by ourselves, and we can install this demonstration application at a later time. For now, we select "From Scratch". Enter a name and an application ID . Preferably choose a name which covers the goal of the application. In our case, we call the application "Intranet". Application ID is a generated and unique identification number, but you can also use some other number for your convenience. At the create application radio group, leave this option to "from scratch". Finally, select the schema where the tables that you want to use for your application reside and click Next.The next step in the wizard is the pages. You can start with a blank page and, from that starting point, extend your APEX application. You can also choose to add reports and forms beforehand. At this point you don't actually define the contents of the pages, you just create the 'skeleton' of them.
We choose to add one blank page and proceed to the next step.Now you can choose to include tabs in your application. Tabs are components that help you navigate through the application. For now, we are not going to use tabs, so select "No Tabs".The next step is the option to copy shared components from another application. Shared components are objects that can be used throughout the application, for example a list of values or images. Since we create a simple application from scratch, we don't want to copy shared components from another application. Select No.
An authentication scheme is a means of allowing users access to our application. APEX offers different methods for this. More will be explained in another recipe. The scheme for this application will be selected in the next step.
Now that we have completed the wizard, we can click on the create button to confirm. The application will be created and we will see a number of pages, depending on how many pages we already created in step 6.
Depending on the type of authentication, we will also see page 101—Login. This is the default page APEX navigates to when you run an application using authentication. It is generated automatically with all functionality to allow users to log in to our application.
Click the large Run Application button to go to the login page.
We can log in on this page with the same credentials we use to gain access to the APEX development environment. So enter this username and password and click the Login button.
Well, that's it! We've created and run our first Oracle APEX 4.0 application. We can now click on the pages to define them, or we can add new pages to extend our application. We can also click the run application icon to see what has actually been created. Since we only included an empty page, we will see something like this—an empty application except for a single, also empty page:
How it works...
We have just created our first application. Even though it's just an empty shell, this is the starting point for all APEX applications. Creating content for our application is a whole different story and will be explained in the following recipes.
Creating a simple form page
After you have created the application it is time to create one or more forms and reports. First let's get started with a simple form. We will build a tabular form with insert, update, and delete possibilities.
Getting ready
Make sure that the table our form is based on contains a primary key and a sequence to update the primary key. In this case, we will be using the EMP table, so we have to make sure it is available in our database schema.
Also we have to make sure the application that we created in the previous recipe is available.
How to do it...
The starting point for this recipe is the overview of the Intranet application we created in the previous recipe.
The form will be created and here you can choose to run the form to see how it looks or you can edit the form to define things. When running the form, it should look like the following:
How it works...
A tabular form is actually an updateable report. In the region section you can find the query which populates the data to show on the screen. By default, every row of the table is shown. We can restrict the result set by adding a where-clause to this query.
When we edit the page we can see that the wizard created the four buttons and the processes for the DML (data manipulation language). The tree view shows an overview of the components the page is built up of. On the left we can see the components used for the rendering of the page (Regions, Items and such). It is built up in such a way that we can see the order of the components that are rendered when the page is loaded.
The middle section shows the components used for the processes on the page; in this case, these are validations, data manipulation, and branching. The right section shows an overview of all shared components used on this page, if any are available.
We can right-click on any component in the tree view to see the possible actions for that component.
You can see that there are two multi-row update processes. The first one is triggered by the submit button and updates the changed rows. The add rows button initiates two processes: the second multi-row update process and the add rows process. So, actually the add rows button submits the changes the user made so far and after that it creates an empty row.
The delete button initiates a JavaScript process that asks the user for confirmation. And this confirmation starts the delete process. This JavaScript function can be found in the HTML header section of the page properties.
There's more…
You can also make a simple single record form. Here's how to do it.
In the application builder, click on the created application.
Creating a simple report
In our application we would also like to have an overview of all employees in the company. We can get this overview by creating a report. There are several types of reports and we just start with a simple report based on a query.
Getting ready
The starting point is our created application. You need an existing table, like EMP.
How to do it...
Some of the other types of reports will be covered in other recipes in this book. The next recipe is on Interactive Reports. In Chapter 8, Webservices, some examples of building reports on Webservices are explained. The option wizard report is not explained separately, because it just offers an easier, step-by-step way of building a report.
In the next step you can assign a page number and a page name to the report. Furthermore you can indicate whether you would like to have breadcrumbs on your report page. Leave the breadcrumb option to "do not use breadcrumbs on page" and click Next.In this step you can choose to include tabs in your report page. We leave it to "do not use tabs". Click Next.In this step you must enter a query in the textarea. You can use the query builder to help you build your query, but you can also enter it manually. We use the following query:The report is ready now. You can edit the report to define the settings or you can run the report to see how it looks. The result should be something like this:
How it works...
When you look at the page in the Application Builder, you will see that APEX created a reports region.
Sometimes in a project, the business case for a report changes. Instead of a classic report, the customer would like an Interactive Report. In case there are two options, remove the current report region and create a new one based on an Interactive Report or just migrate the current report using built-in functionality.
When we are looking at the Region Definition tab of the Edit region page, we can see a Tasks list on the right side of the screen. One of the options is Migrate to Interactive Report. This migration is not a Holy Grail, but can save a lot of time in the migration process.
Click the link to Migrate to Interactive Report.In the following page, enter EMPNO in the Unique Column field and click the Migrate button to see what happens.In the tree view of the page we can see that the old report region still exists but it's labeled Disabled. The new interactive report is added as we can see.
More on Interactive Reports is explained in the following recipe.
See also
Chapter 8 explains (among many other things) how to create a report on Webservice references.
The next recipe "Implement an interactive report" explains how to build a page with an interactive report and what options there are when using them.
Implementing an interactive report
In this recipe, we are going to create an interactive report and show you how to use it. An interactive report is a special kind of report, which offers a lot of options to the user for filtering, sorting, publishing, and much more.
Getting ready
It's always
