Oracle APEX includes the realy nice feature of exporting an Application “As of x minutes ago”.

But there is also a dialog where you can export a single page, without the whole application overhead:

But this dialog lists only currently existing Pages and doesn’t include our deleted Page.

Firebug to the rescue we manipulate the HTML-Code of the Page-Select-List and add our deleted Page 99 which then exports easily “As of 30 minutes ago”.

1. Use Firebugs “Inspect Element” on the Page-Select-List

2. Edit the HTML and insert a new <option>

3. pick the newly added entry from the select-list, enter 30 as number of minutes and press the export button

4. go to the import menu and import the Page-Export File.

That’s all.

Life can be sooo easy using the right tools :-)

Luckily Patrick blogged about this a few years back and i want to bring this to attention again.

By Default static LOVs use “,” and “;” as seperation characters between Lov Display Value and Lov Return Value (and the next Lov Display Value…).

Example:

STATIC2:No Work;NOWORK,Holiday;HOLIDAY,Working Day;DEFAULT

Now if you want to use “;” or “,” as Display or Return Value, you can tell the Static-LOV to use other seperation characters

STATIC2(~,*):No Work, Holiday*FREE~Working Day*DEFAULT

This might not sound to glorious now, but when you need it you’ll be grateful ;-)

The reason to this error can be a too large value in Manage Instance > Security > Account Password Lifetime (days). For example you can store there a number of 999999 days which is saved without any problems, but when trying to edit an user you get the ORA-01841 error message.

This error occurs in APEX 4.0.2.*, reported as Bug in APEX Forum.

Thanks Pascal for showing this error to me.

This can reduce the use experience and usability a lot.

Sometimes it is a better way to put the fields in two (maybe three) columns and present them all on one screen. This gives the user the benefit of seeing all the information at once.

The easiest way of getting a two column Form in APEX is creating the Form with the Wizard and setting the attribute “Begin On New Line” for every second item to “No”.

This gives you a Form like this:

As you can see the 2 columns are right next to each other, they don’t use the space on the right side at all.

It would be much nicer, if there would be some space in between those 2 columns, so that the first column is on the left side of the screen and the second one on the right side of the screen.
If there is more space (larger screen/window) the space between the columns should expand, if a smaller window/screen is used the space between the columns should shrink until it disappears.

If you want to try how this feels you can use this demo-app on apex.oracle.com.
Pick any entry from the list, click the edit-icon and increase/decrease the size of your browser window.

How does it work?

Well, there may be many different solutions to solve this. One of them is the one i used: insert a blank table-column.

Huh?
Ok, from the start: APEX uses HTML Tables to layout the screen.

• In a 1-column Form Layout there is a HTML Table with two columns. The First column holds the label, the second column holds the item itself.
• In a 2-column Form Layout (as in the middle picture) there are four columns use. Columns one and three hold labels, columns two and four hold items.

When we insert a new column on position 3 (where you can see the red arrows in picture 3) and give this column the command to use as much space as it gets, the layout will adapt as we want.

To insert the new column we simply add </td><td width=”50%”>&nbsp; to the “Post Element Text” of the items in the first column.

That’s all, enjoy!

If you missed the latest new: Datamodeler is now FREE (as in “gratis”).

Go get the tools!

Read more about it on Kris Rice Blog

Given Example, you have a report which reads from some table and joins the values you have defined in a Static LOV

SELECT SOME.A
     , SOME.B
     , LOV .DISPLAY_VALUE
  FROM SOME_TABLE SOME
     , APEX_APPLICATION_LOV_ENTRIES LOV
 WHERE LOV.APPLICATION_ID      = :APP_ID
   AND LOV.LIST_OF_VALUES_NAME = 'MY_TRANSLATED_LOV'
   AND LOV.RETURN_VALUE        = SOME.C

This works fine, until you are in a multilingual environment where the LOV entries are translated to the respective target language. With the given SELECT you would display the LOV Entry as defined in the main application, not the translation.

To access the Translation you need to use :APP_TRANSLATION_ID

SELECT SOME.A
     , SOME.B
     , LOV .DISPLAY_VALUE
  FROM SOME_TABLE SOME
     , APEX_APPLICATION_LOV_ENTRIES LOV
 WHERE LOV.APPLICATION_ID      = :APP_TRANSLATION_ID
   AND LOV.LIST_OF_VALUES_NAME = 'MY_TRANSLATED_LOV'
   AND LOV.RETURN_VALUE        = SOME.C

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!