Duncan Mein's Blog

One of the really nice features of APEX is the ability to hide / show regions when editing item or page attributes. This is really useful if you have to update the same attribute for multiple items. If you want to implement this type of approach on a page you simply need to: Create a New Region Template Either create a new region template (or copy an existing one) and add a DIV tag with the id="XXX#REGION_STATIC_ID#" around the Definition Template. Don’t forget to close the DIV at the end of the template. In this example I copied our region called “Reports Region” and named it “Reports Region 680 Width (Static ID)” Add the following JavaScript to your Page Header: view Create several regions on your page and assign a unique Static ID i.e. REGION1, REGION2 etc. Set the Region Template to the one you created in the 1. Create a button for each Region you defined in the previous stage and add the following JavaScript call as the URL target of each button: javascript:hideDiv(‘XXXR...

To set the TAB order of your form, you simply need to add the attribute: TABINDEX="1" to the "HTML Form Element Attributes" of your items replacing the number with the desired sequence. This is a great way of enhancing the usability of your forms.

I have just been reading the Apex 3.1 API documentation and noticed that the JavaScript API that are commonly used in Apex are now documented: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E10513_01/doc/appdev.310/e10499/api.htm#CHDBJJDC There is some very useful stuff in there!!

If you have been using Interactive Reports since Apex 3.1 landed, you are probably as impressed with them as I am. The other day I tried to create more than 1 IR on a page and the Wizard prevented me saying "Only 1 Interactive Report can be declared on this page" I then tired to copy a region that contained an Interactive Report and sure enough I suddenly had 2 IR's on the one page! Whilst this is probably not supported or suggested, my requirement meant that only 1 IR was to be shown at once (i.e. I had a conditional diaply on both IR) So if you need to create multiple IR's on the one page but will only display one at run time, copy of a region appears to work!

The current application I am working on involves a re-write to a 12 screen wizard that was written 18 months ago. Several of the screens make use of manually built tabular forms (SQL report regions) and collections to hold the values entered. Some of the screens in the wizard have multiple tabular forms on them as well. Currently all tabular forms have 15 lines which cannot be added to or deleted from. In the new version, we removed this limit and allow the user to add as many rows as he / she needs. Furthermore, specific rows can now be removed from the Tabular form. Since all entered data is written into collections, we wanted to avoid " line by line " processing i.e. submitting the form for each time, updating the collection and branching back to the page. By utilising some simple JavaScript and the new " Static ID " of the Reports Region new to APEX 3.0, all requirements could be met. The Static ID attribute of the reports region allow us to add our own (unique)...

I bought a Mac Book Pro about 8 months ago as my main business Laptop. Coupled with a copy of Parallels, I built my Oracle Server (Database and Apps Server) on a Windows VM environment which left Mac OSX free for Development using SQL Developer, Dreamweaver etc A couple of weeks back I decided to upgrade to OSX Leopard and install windows natively using Bootcamp to utilise both core's on the CPU and all 3 Gig of memory. All well and good until i tried to use the Hask key (Alt + 3 in OSX) when working on some APEX templates. After much research on the web, it appears that most OSX key mappings are installed when using bootcamp but in order to print the hash (#) symbol, you must use Ctrl + Alt + 3 Simple when you know how

After the lastest round of updates were installed from Microsoft, I foolishly forgot to uncheck the "Upgrade to I.E 7" box and hence after a reboot, a fresh new version of Internet Explorer was waiting for me. On face value this appeared ok until I tried to access Mercury Test Director. According to the error message, only I.E 6 was supported. A quick search on google and I happened upon this website: http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE and downloaded the installer which contained multiple version of I.E from 3.0 to 6.0 that run in standalone. Not only has this fixed my problem of accessing applicaitons, it also allows me to test my applications against earlier versions of I.E. Very useful indeed