Announcing APEX Public Training

In the midst of all of the OOW blogs, I hope this one makes it through! I didn't make it to OOW as we're expecting our second child any day, hour or minute now, and being clear across the country would not have been the best idea that I've come up with...

In any case, I'm pleased to announce that Sumner Technologies, LLC has scheduled its first public training session. It will be held from January 28th through January 30th, 2008 in Ashburn, Virginia. The course will be Introduction to APEX 3.0, which is designed to provide an extensive overview of APEX using mostly hands-on exercises.

More details can be found here: http://sumnertechnologies.com/pls/htmldb/f?p=10000:300

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Custom Export to CSV

It's been a while since I've updated my blog. I've been quite busy lately, and just have not had the time that I used to. We're expecting our 1st child in just a few short weeks now, so most of my free time has been spent learning Lamaze breathing, making the weekly run to Babies R Us, and relocating my office from the larger room upstairs to the smaller one downstairs - which I do happen to like MUCH more than I had anticipated. I have everything I need within a short walk - a bathroom, beer fridge, and 52" HD TV. I only need to go upstairs to eat and sleep now, but alas, this will all change soon... Recently, I was asked if you could change the way Export to CSV in ApEx works. The short answer is, of course, no. But it's not too difficult to "roll your own" CSV export procedure. Why would you want to do this? Well, the customer's requirement was to manipulate some data when the Export link was clicked, and then export it to CSV in a forma

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If you've been using APEX long enough, you've probably used a PL/SQL Region to render some sort of HTML that the APEX built-in components simply can't handle. Perhaps a complex chart or region that has a lot of custom content and/or layout. While best practices may be to use an APEX component, or if not, build a plugin, we all know that sometimes reality doesn't give us that kind of time or flexibility. While the PL/SQL Region is quite powerful, it still lacks a key feature: the ability to be refreshed by a Dynamic Action. This is true even in APEX 5. Fortunately, there's a simple workaround that only requires a small change to your code: change your procedure to a function and call it from a Classic Report region. In changing your procedure to a function, you'll likely only need to make one type of change: converting and htp.prn calls to instead populate and return a variable at the end of the function. Most, if not all of the rest of the code can rem

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A customer recently asked how APEX could track who clicked “download” from an Interactive Grid. After some quick searching of the logs, I realized that APEX simply does not record this type of activity, aside from a simple page view type of “AJAX” entry. This was not specific enough, and of course, led to the next question - can we prevent users from downloading data from a grid entirely? I knew that any Javascript-based solution would fall short of their security requirements, since it is trivial to reconstruct the URL pattern required to initiate a download, even if the Javascript had removed the option from the menu. Thus, I had to consider a PL/SQL-based approach - one that could not be bypassed by a malicious end user. To solve this problem, I turned to APEX’s Initialization PL/SQL Code parameter. Any PL/SQL code entered in this region will be executed before any other APEX-related process. Thus, it is literally the first place that a developer can interact with an APEX p

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