Imagine a SQL Report Region (“Classic Report”) and a button next to it. In front of the computer is a nervous user who waits for a certain record to appear in his Report (e.g. this months salary in his bank statement).

So what is he doing? The nervous finger. Clicking the refresh button every 10 seconds. And everytime he clicks the button, the page is submitted and loads the new data. But this Page submitting and reloading takes some time and flickers, which makes our user even more nervous.

Better and faster would be refreshing the report without submitting the Page, looks smooth and totally Web 2.0.

APEX has a JavaScript function $a_report(pId,pMin,pMax,pFetched,pSort) which reloads the reports data and displays it without resubmitting the whole page.
pId is the ID of your Report, pMin and pMax are the RowIds to display, pFetched the number of Rows and pSort can hold some sort clause.

e.g. javascript:$a_report(‘15520013154312712′,’1′,’10′,’10′);

Now all you have to do is put this javascript call into your Buttons Target

And make sure that your Report is set to “Enable Partial Page Refresh”, this is needed to make sure that $a_report knows what to do.

Recently i switched from my old WinXP Notebook to a MacBook Pro and finally managed to set it up for all my working projects and my needs.

When working on ApexLib i often need different Versions of APEX to check the new features, which means multiple databases with each a different APEX Version on it.

My Requirement was to have multiple Virtual Machines, each of them with Oracle XE and APEX installed. The System Requirements shouldn’t be too high, so i decided to go for Linux in my VM’s and use Parallels Desktop as Virtualization Software.

On Parallels Homepage i found a ready prepared VM containing a stripped down linux (without desktop GUI, console only) with a basic Oracle XE installation on it. After downloading it all you have to do is start it.

Another important Requirement was that i needed fixed IP’s for my VM’s and my Mac, regardless which network i am currently connected to. Parallels has a networking option called NAT/Shared Networking for this kind of requirement, to set it up you open the Parallels Preferences and switch networking type to Shared and check the box saying “show in system preferences” and set the DHCP Range to a startpoint of 10.211.55.100.

In the System Preferences under Networking you choose the Parallels Networking Adapter and set its IP address to 10.211.55.101 (or whatever you want, this doesn’t make any difference).

Now open the Configuration of your Virtual Machine, go to Hardware -> Networking Adapter and set this to Shared Networking too.

For the last part start the Virtual Machine, press Alt+F2 to get to the login prompt and log in with root. On the console type “netconfig” and give your Virtual Machine a fixed IP-Address from the free Range before .100 which is your Gateway/DNS.

I chose 10.211.55.32 for APEX 3.2, 10.211.55.31 for APEX 3.1 and so on.
In the file /etc/hosts i added an entry for my Host Mac, so that i don’t need to remember the IP Addresses.

Finally edit the /etc/hosts file on my Mac and add host names for all your Virtual Machines.

Now reboot everything (i know, this isn’t needed but i’m a long time windows user….) and enjoy your little network, to open APEX on a certain machine simply use the before specified host-names, e.g. http://xeapex32:8080/apex

After Installation of ApexLib and Integration into your Application you are all eager to get it running, but all you get is an error in Firebug saying “apexlib not defined”.

ApexLib not defined? What can cause that?

• The main JavaScript File of ApexLib (ApexLib_Full-min.js) can’t be found, or
• the javascript File wasn’t included

At first we check Firebug’s Network Tab to see if the Javascript File was found:

As we can see in the picture, ApexLib_Full wasn’t found, but at least we tried to load it ;-)

So lets check the Region “ApexLib – Javascript/CSS” on Page 0 (that’s the place where we include the ApexLib Files by default).

And there we found it: a simple typo in the Filename “ApexLib_Full .js” where it should read “ApexLib_Full-min.js”.

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.

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…).