My Oracle development blog
Blogging about Designer, Headstart, Forms, APEX and more
Generating true object types using Oracle Designer
01 year ago
Ever needed to generate Oracle object types from Designer? Then you probably noticed that the support for Oracle object types in Designer (10g) is not extensive and will do for straight forward type definitions. And it is possible to add member functions and procedures to the object type. But when you have the need for ‘true’ objects with constructors, inheritance, etc. you are out on your own. It is not possible to record these properties in Designer and you must perform post-generation actions when generating these object types.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you just could record these properties in Designer without the need to perform modifications after generating your DDL scripts?
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Enhancing the Headstart HTML Online Help Generator
01 year ago
Are you using the Headstart utility for generating HTML Help Files?
The default generator is quite straightforward, so when you need for instance some markup in your help text, the only way to do this is to include HTML tags in de Help Text property in Designer. So some knowledge of HTML tags is required. Another downside to using HTML tags is that you can not use greater than (>) and less than (<) characters directly. So must use the HTML special tags > and <.
There is a workaround for this. But this involves modifying the Headstart Utility. (more…)
Using the DB Adapter in Oracle SOA Suite: returning status information
0When working with the DB Adapter within the Oracle SOA Suite (or Oracle Service Bus) you may feel the need to return more than just the result of your call to the database. When calling you web service normally you get a normal SOAP response or a SOAP fault. But even when you get an normal SOAP response, it is possible that this is not the expected behavior and you need to know if, for instance, you supplied enough input arguments in your web service request.
In that case you need more than just the results, you need status (OK/NOT OK) and one or more messages indicating what went wrong if the result was not ok.
XQuery transformations in Oracle Service Bus
3I recently started in a project working with the Oracle Service Bus (release 10gR3) and stumbled upon some issues regarding XQuery transformations.
I should note I did not work previously with XQuery, so it is all new to me.
But when trying to use some builtin functions I noticed that some that not work or did not work as expected, so I created some functions on my own and searched on the internet for some solutions.
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APEX plug-in: CSS-file
1When building a plug-in, sometimes you also need to include a css-file with your plug-in. But how do you do accomplish this? While working on a plug-in for jQuery calculator plug-in, I was facing the same issue. After some searching in the APEX built-in package I found the solution.
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APEX 4.0: jQuery UI revisited
2As I stated in my previous blog entry about using the default jQuery UI libraries this time another approach to using the hidden jQuery UI widgets with APEX 4.0.
Until now we just created the jQuery UI widget almost manually. This is off course not the way you want to implement these kind of features within your application. We want to be able to use the widgets multiple times within our application without too much manual coding. And also be able to use the widget in other applications.
The way to do this, is by creating a plug-in within APEX. A lot of examples of APEX plug-ins show you how to implement jQuery plug-ins within APEX. For these kind of plug-ins you always need to download and include a JavaScript file and sometimes also a css file. For implementing one of the jQuery UI widgets you do not need to do this. At least you do not need to include the files with you plug-ins because they already exists in your APEX installation.
APEX 4.0: Using jQuery UI widgets
1Within APEX 4 jQuery UI is default only enabled with a subset of the elements (core plus some others). But the other UI libraries are included in the release.
Just look in the folder libraries/jquery-ui/1.8 in the APEX images folder (that is the folder which is referenced by the /i/ virtual directory at install time). You will see that all jQuery UI libraries will be there. They are only not loaded default to keep the initial download smaller. So, what to do if you like to use one (or more) of the jQuery UI widgets, such as the slider widget?
In the following tutorial we will create a slider with a range.
APEX 4.0 Dynamic actions
0I recently installed APEX 4.0 on my Linux based computer to check out the new release of Oracle Application Express (APEX).
One of the new features are the so-called dynamic actions. In short dynamic actions allow you to define declaratibe within the APEX IDE dynamic functionality which is performed without the need to submit a page. In other words: AJAX functionality.
APEX makes a distinction between standard and advanced dynamic action. But only at create time – when editing a previous created dynamic action this distinction is no longer visible.
Building a Headstart Productivity booster, part 2
12 years ago
As stated in the previous entry every Headstart Productivity Booster package consist of at least 4 routines which are also specified in the package specification:
1. function revision return varchar2;
2. procedure install;
3. procedure deinstall;
4. procedure run( … );
Except for the procedure run the routines have never any parameters. Within the specification, normally, no other routines will be specified.
The function revision returns the version number of the productivity booster, which can be seen in the logfile, when selecting “Help > About this utility” in the main menu and when showing the helptext for the utility.
The procedure install is used to install the productivity booster as part of the utilities and deinstall to remove the productivity booster. The install procedure is called in the install script /hsu/scripts/inst_pb.sql.
Note: When creating your own productivity boosters (or your own versions of the default Headstart productivity boosters), I suggest you place them in a seperate folder and copy the inst_pb.sql script also to this new folder.
The procedure install defines the help text and the parameters which are shown in the Headstart Utilities form. The procedure deinstall will deinstall the productivity boosters from the list of available utilities.
The procedure run (with or without parameters) is the main routine which actually starts running the productivity booster. The parameters of this procedure are mapped to the parameters which can be entered by the user in the Headstart Utilities form. The order in which the parameters are specified must be the same as defined in the procedure install.
Building a Headstart Productivity booster, part 1
02 years ago
I have created different kind of productivity boosters for Oracle Headstart in the past.
As I am lazy performing some tasks over and over again in Oracle Designer 6i and later, I started creating some custom Headstart Utility Productivity Boosters.
In this part I will discuss making a simple utility for creating public synonymns in the Designer Repository.
There one catch to this utility which we will see later.
When creating a new Productivity Booster, the best way is by copying the supplied example in the folder [Headstart Home]\hsu\scripts\pb: hsu_ex.pks and hsu_ex.pkb.
Rename the the copied to whatever you want to call your Productivity Booster package. Note that the package name and file name should be the same in order to use the Productivity Booster installation script. I recommend that that do not use the prefix hsu, but one of your own. In this example the prefix will be ant.
We will call this package (and thus the file names): ANT_CPSN(Create Public SynoNym).