Feed items
APEX Easter fun
This isn't really an easter egg, just more of a mild bug that makes you think - hopefully a little more about your own applications.
If you type in "0" in the page navigation bar, it takes you to the typical global page / page zero for desktop.
Instead of displaying page processing and shared components, it displays application level components - items, process, computations; and an "About" region in the third column, above recently edited pages. Useful stuff...
Freezing the Navbar Menu plugin to top of page
Recently I blogged about a nifty CSS only menu that is a great alternative to the horrible APEX tab-sets. Unfortunately I had to ditch it for a recent project because it didn't work well on touch screen devices, so I picked up Enkitec's Navbar plugin instead.
CSS pull down menu using APEX List
I find APEX tab sets cause all sorts of issues in applications, either through management or behaviour. A common request is to create some pull-down menus as a replacement.
There are plenty of options for this, including a number of jQuery plugins, but here is an example that uses only CSS
http://www.lwis.net/free-css-drop-down-menu/ultimate.horizontal.html
This makes it lightweight and fast.
Implement Bullet Sparkline using extended Enkitec Plug-in
This post details the implementation of an extended version the Enkitec Sparklines Plug-in to include bullet charts. Previously I posted how this extension was made.
First you need to download and import the plug-in. Once this is done, you can define the data used, then create a dynamic action to convert the data into the sparkline chart.
Extend APEX sparklines plugin to include bullet chart
Dan McGhan recently announced a new plug-in using sparklines. This post details how I extended the plug-in to support another chart type. A separate post details how I implemented this in an application.
SQL Analytics 101 - Row_Number()
Here is a simple example for when SQL Analytical Functions are simple yet useful.
I wanted a basic 1,2,3,4 count so I could alternate colours in a report.
select ename, sal, rownum rn
,mod(rownum,4) mod_rn
,mod(row_number() over (order by sal),4) mod_rna
from emp
order by sal
ENAME SAL RN MOD_RN MOD_RNA
---------- ------- ------ ------- --------
Reasons you should upgrade your APEX environment
For those interested, here is a prezi-style presentation on why I think you should be upgrading your APEX environment to at least 4.x.
Hopefully you understand the messages without listening to my babble.
I presented this to our local Perth user group as part of a double header with Mark Randell discussing (on a similar theme) why you should upgrade your database to 11gR2.
APEX Gauge Chart example
How ready is tomorrow's presentation?
Playing with dates, again
When creating LOVs for APEX I sometimes debate to myself whether to make a static or dynamic LOV.
I had one scenario where having some SQL was handy, so I started with this
SELECT TO_CHAR(NEXT_DAY(sysdate, 'MON')+ROWNUM-1,'DY')
FROM dual
CONNECT BY LEVEL <= 7;
It's possible to then place this as an inline view within a subquery factoring clause, to use fancy terminology. This makes it easy to share column data.
