Every time I try something in APEX 4.0 i find some cool new functions or features, for the moment my favourites are:

• Plugins, Plugins, Plugins
• new Debug Mode
• Tree View in Application Builder

Check APEX out now and find your cant-live-without-it-features!

Websheets are available now, a totally new and better debug interface and many more.

Read these posts to get a complete picture:

• Joel Kallman – Application Express 4.0 Early Adopter Phase II is available
• Patrick Wolf – Oracle APEX 4.0 Early Adopter Release 2 available!
• John Scott – APPLICATION EXPRESS 4.0 – EARLY ADOPTER 2 NOW AVAILABLE
• Mark Lancaster – APEX 4.0 EA2: Improved debugging, my new favorite feature

Don’t waste any time, go to http://tryapexnow.com/ and sign yourself up for a workspace. After logging in to your new workspace click the “Learn more” button to go to a very good introduction documentation.

Ok, ok, here are some Details: while it had lots and lots of fresh snow and temperatures below zero at home in Vienna, i did some relaxing in 30° (Celsius) sunny wheather on a marvelous beach with a real interesting coral reef right next to it.
No need for scuba diving there, just by simply snorkeling i’ve seen so many different fish it was astounding.

Stay tuned, i’ll have some interesting Posts in the next weeks!

When displaying error messages in the notification area the rest of the page is shifted downwards a little. This is no problem most of the time, except in this case:

1. you have a form with required fields
2. you enter some of the fields and then realize you don’t want to enter more but leave the form
3. so you press the “Cancel” Button while your cursor is still in an empty required field
4. before the Cancel Button is processed the field validation displays the “Field is required” Message
5. displaying the Error shifts the button downwards, the mouse cursor isn’t hovering above the button anymore
6. the browser decides, that you clicked into empty space and discards Button processing

Long story short, you have to press the button a second time if an error message is displayed in the notification area when pressing the button.

I haven’t found any satisfying solution to avoid this problem in a programmatically way, so this leaves us with few options:

1. ignore it and let your users click a second time
2. have a fixed size notification area (this is kind of complicated, since you never know how many error messages you need to display)
3. my favorite: let the notification area hover above the rest of your form

Solution 3 can look like this, depending on your layout or used theme you’ll have to implement it in a different way.

See a working solution online in the Demo-Application.

All I had to do, was modifying the CSS Settings for the notification area:

.t7notification {
 background:none repeat scroll 0 50% #FFFFCC;
 border:1px solid #FFD700;
 color:#333333;
 font-size:11px;
 font-weight:bold;
 left:25%;
 margin:4px auto;
 opacity:0.8;
 filter:alpha(opacity=80);
 padding:2px;
 position:absolute;
 text-align:center;
 width:50%;
}

A common problem after installing Oracle Application Express and configuring a workspace in the Admin/Internal Area is not finding the Workspace Login Screen.

The thing is with http://127.0.0.1:8080/apex/apex_admin you only get the Administrator Login:

If you want to get to the Workspace Login Screen, simply remove /apex_admin from your URL: http://127.0.0.1:8080/apex

That, i figured, should be rewarded.

So i’m opening a series of blog posts which deal with those Questions and provide all 2-3 weeks a short answer. Short and to the point (i hope).

Of course i recommend asking questions on the official (and very active) Forum, but some things are better explained in a blog with one or to pictures for illustration.

And now, if you want to ask something, just drop a comment or search for it :-)

As soon as there is a stable release of APEX 4.0 i’ll decide if there is any need for a special version of ApexLib for APEX 4.0. At the moment it looks as if ApexLib works as expected, but some of its features are obsolete due to enhancements of Application Express.

Other Features of ApexLib can be achieved by using new Plugin types.

But: ApexLib development continues, i’m working on some nice features which even don’t exist in APEX 4.0 :-)

If you have any special requirements or would like to see a special new feature in ApexLib just drop a comment and i’ll see what can be done (in my spare time…).

Christmas holidays were very peaceful and quite, i spent most time with my family, friends and my girlfriend. In between i squeezed in some time playing around with Apex 4.0 ;-)

Besides all other fantastic new things i concentrated most on the plugin concept of APEX 4.0, which is really good already, but not complete yet (e.g. defining of plugin-specific CSS files is missing).

For begin of january i plan to write a how-to on creating Plugins with detailed explanation and some examples which will be available for download here: http://tryapexnow.com/apex/f?p=2500).

I wish all of you a happy new Year!

There is nothing for sure at the moment, but it looks like this would be an online-only release, so nothing to download and test on your local database, more like http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn .

Stay tuned for details and subscribe to this blog, my twitter feed or directly Patricks twitter feed.

Looking for a certain application can be time consuming if you don’t remember what the workspace this application belongs to is called.

At this point you could either check the repository using a SELECT

SELECT *
  FROM APEX_APPLICATIONS
 WHERE APPLICATION_NAME LIKE '%XY%';

Or you could login into the administration section (workspace INTERNAL) and look there.

Way easier is having a listing of all applications right below the login fields:

This makes finding the right workspace faster and easier, having the listing of all applications in your database is like a directory listing of all your files you are working on.

Warning: Displaying information about your applications is a potential security risk, you should use this on internal development systems only, never on a public system!

How does it work?

As you may know, Oracle APEX is written in Oracle APEX. An APEX Builder page is just like any other page you  may design for your application. That means you easily can add a reports region to the login page.

The only downside here is that you can’t edit internal applications with the APEX Builder, you just can’t login to the INTERNAL workspace in edit mode.

But no need for that, we just use the same API that’s used in the Application export files.

Check out the script over here. It basically adds a reports region to the (english) login page, thats all.

Disclaimer: Enhancing/changing the internal applications may not be intended by Oracle, so there is no warranty at all. Whatever you do is own your own risk.
Go for it :-)