Francis Mignault APEX Blog

Upgrading to APEX 4.1 on Oracle 10.2.0.3 - ORA-06502

2012-01-24T10:17:00.002-05:00

I have been upgrading a lot (and I mean a lot) of APEX environments to 4.1 and never had any issues until ... well until I encontered the infamous error : "ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error: associative array shape is not consistent with session parameters".

Upgrading APEX is very simple. You just have to run the apexins.sql script and voila.
So the question is , what to you do if this script fails.

Well, first of all, you have to take backups before any upgrades like any other database upgrades. Better safe than sorry. Full rman database backups are better, rebuilding from a full export is a bit more tricky.

There is also a java class that comes with APEX that allows you to schedule backups of your applications. APEXExport does an export of your applications by workspace or for the full instance. You can run that java class in a script file. You will find it in the APEX zip under utilities / oracle / apex .

Back to my original story :). I ran the apexins.sql script to upgrade from APEX 3.1 to APEX 4.1 and got the ORA-06502 error.

I searched on google to find out that this is a bug with 10.2.0.3 :

9930553 - FAILED INSTALLATION ON 10.2.0.3
Application Express 4.0 cannot be installed on Database version 10.2.0.3 on Linux and potentially other platforms as well. The installation will end with "ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error: associative array shape is not consistent with session parameters".
Solution: Apply the patch for bug 5890966 (related bug) or apply the 10.2.0.3 Patch 6 on Windows Platforms (if on Windows Platforms) or apply the 10.2.0.4 database patch set or upgrade to 11gR1 or later.

I was upgrading a production environment and at this point my options were :

restore database
rollback to previous version of APEX
apply the database patch and rerun the Upgrade

Option 1 was a last resort option. This would affect too many other systems, some not related to APEX. And it would take too much time.

Option 2, well, if you read the APEX documentation, it is usually easy to perform. (BTW I think that there is an error in the documentation , you probably have to run

exec flows_030100.wwv_flow_upgrade.switch_schemas

('APEX_040100','FLOWS_030100');

Instead of APEX_030200 ...) .

When you upgrade an APEX instance, it does not really upgrade. It creates a new schema called APEX_040100 (where 040100 is the version of APEX) and upgrades / copies the applications from the previous APEX schema. To rollback, you simply run a script that recreates APEX synonyms to point back to the previous version (wwv_flow_upgrade.switch_schemas). In that specific case, the procedure to switch back was a bit more complicated. Don't ask me why, it just is. And at the end, APEX would not be upgraded to 4.1 but back to 3.1.

Option 3, this really depended on the impact of the patch. Patching a production environment usually need some testing and planning. Fortunately, in our case, this patch was a minor patch. I contacted the DBA in charge and he agreed to apply it.

The question was: If I re-run the apexins.sql script, will it know that the last valid install was APEX 3.1 and not the failed APEX 4.1 ? Can I just drop the APEX_040100 schema and re-run the apexins.sql script or do I have to rollback to the previous release before re-upgrading ?

The answer is : apexins.sql will check the latest version of APEX before upgrading. So you can drop the failed install schema (in this case APEX_040100) and re-run the upgrade without any worries.

I did just that and Bingo ! everything worked like a charm.

Lesson learned :

When you upgrade APEX, make sure that you have good backups. Even if the upgrade is a very simple process and almost never fails. Sometimes it can fail due to Database issues like bugs or tablespaces being full etc.

If the install/upgrade fails, you can drop the APEX schema and rerun the script.

Better run APEX on 10.2.0.4 and up :)

Francis.

Time to Vote

2011-10-20T14:09:00.002-04:00

It is now time to Vote for the ODTUG Board of Directors.

Two of my friends are running this year, Martin D'Souza and Monty Latiolais. They are both dedicated to their work and to the community. Please support them. Without their help, the Oracle APEX community would not be what it is.

So if you are an ODTUG member, do you duty and Vote now !

For Martin's profile and bio check his blog.

APEX à Montreal et Québec

2011-10-14T12:17:00.004-04:00

Le 12 et 13 octobre 2011, j'ai participé à une journée APEX à Montréal et à Québec.

Ma présentation portait sur le multilinguisme dans APEX 4.1

Quelques nouvelles fonctionnalités ont été ajoutées pour faciliter la traduction et la maintenance de cette dernière dans 4.1

Par exemple , il est maintenant facile de voir si nos applications de traductions nécessites une synchronisation suite à une modification de l'application principale.

Mais, je crois que l'ajout le plus important est la possibilité, maintenant, d'exporter et importer les traductions avec l'application principale. Surtout que l'on peut importer dans un ID d'application différent (APP_ID) et qu'APEX gardera le "mapping" et même, utilisera de nouveaux "APP_ID" pour les applications traduites sans perdre le référentiel de traduction.

Par contre, lors de ma présentation à Québec, l'import dans une autre application ID ne fonctionnait pas. J'ai alors contacté Oracle pour me rendre compte qu'il s'agissait en fait d'un bogue...

Pour s'assurer que l'import fonctionne correctement , il s'agit d'appliquer une patch disponible sur le support.oracle.com . Cette patch est extrêmement simple à appliquer. Il s'agit d'un seul script sql à exécuter.

Voici le détail du bug de traduction :

12927540 - IMPORTED TRANSLATIONS HAVE AN INCORRECT MAPPING FROM ID
When importing an application export which includes translations, the ID values in the imported translation repository may not reflect the adjusted language mapping ID. Since the IDs are incorrect in the translation repository, the publish operation will not use the translated text from the translation repository.
Solution: There is a patchset exception for this available on metalink - search by bug number.

Il y également d'autres problèmes connus avec APEX 4.1, vous trouverez la liste ici

Donc lors de ma deuxième présentation à Montréal , j'ai pu démontrer l'import dans un ID différent et cette fois, tout fonctionne à merveille !

Voici la présentation que j'ai donné lors de ces deux journées conférences.

Applications multilingues avec Oracle Application Express

Francis.

Expert Oracle Application Express Book

2011-04-29T16:44:00.002-04:00

A new APEX book will soon be available. Another one. But this new book called "Expert Oracle Application Express" is also in memory of Scott Spadafore and Carl Backstrom.

Each chapters has been written by different people that knew Scott and Carl. Here is a list of the contributors :

I was honoured to be part of this project and I would like to thank John Scott for invinting me to participate. My chapter is about APEX Globalization. Let me tell you, writing this chapter made me realize that it takes a lot of work and efforts , and it was only one chapter, imagine a whole book ! This was a first for me. I now have a lot of respects for authors that writes technical books. Also, being French Canadian made it even harder, trying to write something that would be easy to read and well phrased. I don't know if I succeeded though (As you can see in my blog posts ;) ). Nevertheless , it was worth it and if at least it only contributes to help both families , than I will be very happy. Because all the royalties from the sales of the book will be split 50/50 between the two memorial funds.

For more details on the book , see John's blog post.

The book is already available on Amazon . Buy it, it's for a good cause.

Francis.

Press Release - Insum

2011-01-07T13:11:00.001-05:00

MONTREAL POLYTECHNIQUE SCHOOL SELECTS INSUM SOLUTIONS TO DEVELOP THEIR INTERNSHIP AND JOB MANAGEMENT APPLICATION

Insum, Oracle Application Express specialists

MONTREAL, November 17th 2010 -Insum Solutions inc. is proud to announce that, following a public tender, École Polytechnique de Montreal has chosen them to develop their new application which will support the job and internship placement service.

“We are very pleased to share our expertise in internet transactional application development with the Polytechnique de Montreal IT team. Our Oracle database proficiency and more precisely our Oracle Application Express expertise will be a great contribution to this project” says Michel St-Amour, president of Insum Solutions.

The application will allow both employers and Polytechnique students to utilize a cutting edge technology tool that will facilitate training positions or permanent jobs allocations.

"Our decision to go with the APEX development tool as our primary technology is what led us to choose the most experienced company with this technology, Insum Solutions. The wide variety of projects developed by Insum and their expertise with Application express is what convinced us we made the correct choice "says Richard Labrie, IT Director at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal.

- - -

About École Polytechnique de Montréal

Founded in 1873, Polytechnique Montréal is one of Canada’s leading engineering schools and the largest in Québec in terms of its student population and the scope of its research activities. With over 37,000 graduates, Polytechnique has formed nearly 30% of the current members of the Quebec Order of Engineer. The school provides programs for 14 engineering specialties, 230 professors and more than 6700 students. With a research budget of 70 million dollars, its annual operating budget totals more than $ 100 million.

About Insum Solutions

Founded in 2002, Insum Solutions is a privately owned information technology firm based in Montreal. We provide consulting and custom application development services. Using reliable, safe, proven products, we allow both our partners and customers to get the most out of the many possibilities brought about by information technology. As specialists and leaders of the Application Express (APEX) tool, our Insum Solution team works exclusively on developing and implementing business solutions based on Oracle technologies.

Source :

Michel St-Amour

President

Insum Solutions inc.

Téléphone : 514 387-1670

Sans frais : 1.866.887.1670

Informations :

Claude Lemaire

Business Development Representative

Insum Solutions inc.

Téléphone : 514 387-1670, poste 231

Sans frais : 1.866.887.1670

Communiqué de presse - Insum

2011-01-07T12:59:00.000-05:00

L’ÉCOLE POLYTECHNIQUE DE MONTRÉAL SÉLECTIONNE
INSUM SOLUTIONS POUR LE DÉVELOPPEMENT DE LEUR
APPLICATION DE GESTION DES OFFRES DE STAGES ET D’EMPLOIS

Insum, spécialiste et chef de file de l'outil de développement Oracle Application Express

MONTRÉAL, le 17 novembre 2010 - Insum Solutions inc. est fière d’annoncer que, à la suite d’un appel d’offres public, l’École Polytechnique de Montréal a retenu ses services pour le développement d’une nouvelle application qui servira de support au service de placement dans le traitement des offres de stages et d’emplois.

«Nous sommes très heureux de pouvoir apporter notre expertise en développement d’applications transactionnelles accessibles sur l’internet à l’équipe TI de l’École Polytechnique. Notre très grande expertise avec la base de données Oracle et plus spécifiquement avec l’outil Oracle Application Express sera mise à grande contribution», mentionne Michel St-Amour, président chez Insum Solutions.
L’application développée permettra aux employeurs et aux étudiants de l’École Polytechnique de se doter d’un outil à la fine pointe de la technologie dont les automatismes pourront faciliter la dotation de postes de stagiaires ou d’emplois permanents.

«Notre décision de choisir l’outil de développement APEX comme technologie primaire de développement nous a amenés à choisir l’entreprise qui possède le plus d’expérience avec cette technologie. La très grande variété des projets développés par Insum ainsi que leur expertise avec l’outil APEX nous a convaincus de la justesse de notre choix», souligne Richard Labrie, directeur du service informatique de l’École Polytechnique de Montréal.

- - -
À propos de l’École Polytechnique de Montréal
Fondée en 1873, l'École Polytechnique de Montréal est l'un des plus importants établissements d'enseignement et de recherche en génie au Canada. Elle occupe le premier rang au Québec pour le nombre de ses étudiants et l'ampleur de ses activités de recherche. Avec plus de 37 000 diplômés, Polytechnique a formé près de 30 % des membres actuels de l'Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec. L'École donne son enseignement dans 14 spécialités du génie. Elle compte 230 professeurs et plus de 6 700 étudiants. À son budget annuel de fonctionnement qui s'élève à plus de 100 millions de dollars s'ajoute un budget de recherche de 70 millions de dollars.

À propos d’Insum Solutions
Fondée en 2002, Insum Solutions est une entreprise privée, basée à Montréal, offrant des services dans le domaine des technologies de l'information. Partenaire Oracle depuis le début de ses opérations, Insum Solutions offre des services professionnels reliés à son expertise en développement d'applications sur mesure, basées sur la base de données Oracle et plus spécifiquement sur l'outil de développement Oracle Application Express.

Source :
Michel St-Amour
Président
Insum Solutions inc.
Téléphone : 514 387-1670
Sans frais : 1.866.887.1670
mstamour@insum.ca
www.insum.ca

Informations :
Claude Lemaire
Représentante, développement des affaires
Insum Solutions inc.
Téléphone : 514 387-1670, poste 231
Sans frais : 1.866.887.1670
clemaire@insum.ca
www.insum.ca

My week at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010

2010-07-08T11:36:00.000-04:00

During the week of June 27 2010, I went to ODTUG Kaleidoscope in Washington DC.

This conference is THE conference to be at if you want to meet with technical people and get involved in the Oracle community, and more especially with the APEX community.

It was a pleasure to meet everyone again.

On Sunday, I was part of the APEX track during the Symposium. The whole day was about building an APEX application from A to Z.

Here is what we did :

Data Model - John Scott
Application Development - Dimitri Gielis
Dynamic Actions/Plug-ins - Dan McGhan
Tuning - Doug Gault
User Interface - Scott Spendolini
Printing - Dietmar Aust
Security - Anton Nielsen
Globalization - Francis Mignault (Me)

I think that the prensentations went pretty well. We had a nice crowd of about 250 people. I got only good comments. I hope that we we were able to demonstrate that you can easily create applications collectively and that APEX covers all the aspects of web development.

For the rest of the week I attended many session on Oracle Application Express.

As you probably already know, Oracle Application Expres 4.0 is now officially released. So the week was mostly about new features in APEX 4.0

I even did my first APEX Plug-in (more on that in another blog post).

Here are some of the things that I learned :

You can integrate Jasper reports with APEX.More on Dietmar Blog.

To Design you applications and do the functional specifications with the user, you can use Balsamiq instead of building a real application. This way, the user will concentrate on his requirements and not on APEX functionalities.

Attending Jonathan Lewis presentation about How to write efficient SQL, I learned a new way of tuning a SQL. You basically draw the tables and analyse the data, the indexes, the volume and the relation between the tables. Very interesting. I kinda already do it that way but this was a well defined and documented approach.

I saw the APEX Websheets in a different angle during the keynote by Joel Kallman and Mike Hichwa . I now see it more as a collaborative tool (like a Wiki) than an Easy Apex application builder for super users.

Martin D'Souza showed a new way of doing VPN without having to install VPN by using views and using USER_CONTEXT.

Patrick Wolf talked about Plug-ins and Dynamic Actions. Those two new features of APEX 4 are really impressive. With Plug-ins you can now build new items and new regions and reuse them in all you applications and even share them with the community. Dynamic Actions, are built-in AJAX controls that you can easily use in your application and there is even advanced dynamic actions !

Dan McGhan did a presentation on javascript for PL/SQL Developers. This presentation was very good and explained very clearly how we can "Query" the content of an HTML page.

Jason Straub talked about Restful webservices in APEX 4.0 and did a demo using APEX accessing AMAZON S3.

I also attended a presentation on FORMS to APEX conversion. At the end of the day, if you want to convert from Forms to APEX, there is no magic solution. APEX has a tool that help you with the migration process but there is a lot of manual work to convert a Client Server application to a web application. Luckily APEX 4.0 have a lot of new features that will make APEX applications closer to Forms Applications. For example new tabular forms with in-line validations , Plug-ins and Dynamic Actions.

And so many other presentations about security, tuning, plug-ins, Application Lifecycles, JQuery, Google Visualizations plug-ins etc...

Overall , it was a great week and a very well Organized conference. I did learned a lot and had the chance to meet with the APEX community. We even had our second ODTUG Kaleidoscope Texas Hold'em Tournament , Thanks to Ron and Rick. ;) Before leaving, I also had the chance to visit the Smithsonian Zoo that was at a walking distance from the Hotel and saw two great Pandas.

Francis.

Oracle Application Express 3.2 The essential and more.

2010-06-17T15:29:00.000-04:00

A new book on APEX 3.2 just got out.

I am reading it and I will give you some feedback on the content.

So far, it looks like it covers Oracle Application Express very well. I saw that there is a chapter on AJAX and APEX and there is also a whole chapter on globalization and localization with APEX.

For more detail , check it out the Packt Publishing site.

APEX Interactive Reports and :REQUEST

2010-05-11T15:35:00.001-04:00

We just found a problem with APEX, :REQUEST and Interactive Reports.

If you use REQUEST in the Conditional Display of a Region that contains an Interactive Report, the filter and other IR functionalities will hang. Probably because Interactive Reports uses the REQUEST variable...

See a demo here and try to create a filter, you will see that the IR hangs. (If you look at the URL you will see 123 in the REQUEST : http://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=33429:1:1104406850817908:123::::)

The workaround is to add a computation that sets a page item depending on the REQUEST value and use that page item in the conditional display of the Interactive Report Region.

It does not work in APEX 4.0 also (for now) : http://tryapexnow.com/apex/f?p=686:1:3857853599891690:123::::

APEX will Rock Kaleidoscope 2010

2010-05-05T17:38:00.000-04:00

Again this year, ODTUG Kaleidoscope is THE conference to attend if you are looking for information about APEX.

I will be part of the Sunday Symposia where an APEX application will be built from A to Z.

Also check this Article from Oracle about APEX at Kaleidoscope. APEX 4.0 Will definitely be the attraction.

See you there.

APEX 4.0 - Language Derived from session

2010-04-01T14:23:00.000-04:00

In APEX we have different ways of setting the language of our applications. :

Browser language

Use the language of the browser to determine the language of the application

FSP_LANGUAGE_PREFERENCE preference

Use the APEX preference FSP_LANGUAGE_PREFERENCE to set the language of the application

FSP_LANGUAGE_PREFERENCE item

Create an application item called FSP_LANGUAGE_PREFERENCE and set the language of the application by assigning the language value to this item.

To select the Application Language Derived From , go in the Shared Components - Edit Globalization Attributes.

FSP_LANGUAGE_PREFERENCE item is the option that we use the most. With that option you can create a button with a process to set the value of FSP_LANGUAGE_PREFERENCE to the language of your choice. We also use it to display the data in the correct language using v('FSP_LANGUAGE_PREFERENCE') in views.

When you use this method, there is a small problem. If you want to access a page directly via an URL (or create a bookmark) you end up in the application in the primary language on the first page view.

ex: http://host/apex/f?p=12870:1:0::::FSP_LANGUAGE_PREFERENCE:fr-ca
Doing so, brings you to the application and sets FSP_LANGUAGE_PREFERENCE but the page displays in the primary language (en-us in this case). That is because APEX sets the language of the application before it assign the value to the item FSP_LANGUAGE_PREFERENCE.
After the first page load, if the user navigates or submit the page, the application gets displayed in the language of the item FSP_LANGUAGE_PREFERENCE.

In APEX 4.0, there is a new way of setting the language of your application : SESSION

Using this option in "Application Language Derived From" , will let you specify the language of your application directly in the URL using &P_LANG (Same principle as turning the Trace On by adding &P_TRACE=YES at the end of the URL).

Ex:
To access the application in french : http://tryapexnow.com/apex/f?p=12870:1:0&P_LANG=fr-ca
To access the application in english : http://tryapexnow.com/apex/f?p=12870:1:0&P_LANG=en-us

There are also three new procedures :

APEX_UTIL.SET_SESSION_LANG( p_lang in varchar2 )
APEX_UTIL.GET_SESSION_LANG return varchar2
APEX_UTIL.RESET_SESSION_LANG

Note that those procedures will work only when you use "SESSION" in the Application Language Derived From. APEX_UTIL.GET_SESSION_LANG won't return the language value of other language derivation methods.

If you want to get the session lang, you can also use the v('BROWSER_LANGUAGE') variable. It will show the APEX application language (Not the browser language).

In my demo application, to switch from one language to another, I created a button "Switch Lang" that calls a PL/SQL process that does :

if nvl(apex_util.get_session_lang,'en-us') = 'en-us'
    then apex_util.set_session_lang('fr-ca');
    else apex_util.set_session_lang('en-us');
end if;

This is a great new feature in APEX 4.0 if you use the globalization a lot like we do. Thanks to Joel for helping me out on this blog post.

Scott Spadafore

2010-03-22T12:06:00.001-04:00

I was very sad to learn today that Scott Spadafore passed away last night. (See Joel Kallman blog)

I had the chance to meet with him multiple times at different APEX conferences and he was always happy to answer my technical questions.

I would like to offer my condolences to his family , colleagues and friends.

APEX Import ERR-3331

2010-02-25T11:57:00.000-05:00

If your applications gets big , you may encounter this error "ERR-3331 This page was already submitted and can not be re-submitted while importing your application." while importing into APEX.

This is caused by the OHS (Oracle HTTP Server / Apache ) timing out.

Even if you get this error, the Oracle process that imports your application will continue until it ends successfully, so your application will be imported correctly.

To avoid having this error, simply change the OHS configuration. In the httpd.conf file located in your Apache/conf directory and increase the Timeout parameter.

#
# Timeout: The number of seconds before receives and sends time out.
#
Timeout 300
#Timeout 60

You can find more information in this thread in the APEX forum.

APEX 4.0 Early Adopter

2009-12-21T14:04:00.000-05:00

Joyeux Noël !

La version "Early Adopter" 4.0 de APEX est présentement disponible sur le Amazon Cloud.

Pour y avoir accès allez a : http://tryapexnow.com

Vous pouvez donc tout de suite avoir un avant gout de la version finale et essayer les nouvelles fonctionalités telle que les Tabular Forms , les items plug-in, les actions dynamiques (Mise en place de javascript sans avoir a coder).

Attention, certaines restrictions s'appliquent. Voir le blog de Joel Kallman.

Oracle OpenWorld 09 Pictures

2009-12-01T16:42:00.003-05:00

Here are some pictures from Oracle Openworld 09.

I had a great time.

You can see some pictures about :

- San Francisco
- APEX 4.0
- Larry Ellison Keynote (With Arnold)
- Alcatraz in the cloud
- Golden Gate Bridge in the cloud
- Appreciation Event with Aerosmith

Apexposed 2009

2009-12-01T16:27:00.001-05:00

Here are some pictures taken at APEXPOSED 09 .

We (Insum) were attending as an exhibitor and I also did two presentations:

One about APEX deployment strategies and the other one abour Software As A Service with APEX.

The nice thing about APEXPosed is that there were 3 tracks : Beginner, Advanced and Web 2.0. So I attended some sessions about web 2.0. Tim St-Hilaire and Doug Gault sessions were good sessions . They both explained step by step implementation of web 2.0 functionalities.

There was also a keynote from Mike Hichwa about the usage of APEX at Oracle and APEX 4.0. I learned that APEX was created on April 8 1999 :).

APEXPOSED 2009

2009-11-09T22:27:00.002-05:00

Ok, I know, I didn't had time to finish my posts about Openworld 09.

But , time goes so fast ...

Now I am at ODTUG Apexposed in Atlanta and I will be presenting tomorrow and wednesday.

I will "try" to keep my posts short but informative.

And don't worry, I will someday, soon, find some time to finish my posts about OOW 09 with some pictures...

OOW09 - Day1

2009-10-12T13:21:00.002-04:00

I arrived in San Francisco on Saturday night. The night was short and as always , it is hard to get some good sleep when you are not home.

Anyway, on Sunday, despite the small jet lag and ther fact that I had almost no sleep, I attended some interesting sessions.

I attended Tom Kyte's keynote. As usual, very good presentation. He talked about what sometimes seemed as a small change resquest could be very complex. All the different teams (UI, DBA, Developers, etc) have to work together and be involved when new changes have to be done.

After that I had to run to Moscone West (15 minute walk) to attend the APEX ODTUG symposium. It was great to meet and see everyone from the comunity again.

I attended also a presentation on converting ACCESS to APEX.

I find that there are more and more people interested in APEX. I mean, after more then 5 years, the product is gaining some real maturity and keeps improving.

I ran back to the Hilton to the APEX 4.0 Session. It is the third time that I see a presentation on 4.0 and everytime, there are new nie features added. Now, in addition to tabular forms, websheets, declarative ajax and item plugins, there is a new team development section. You can now follow bugs, todo's etc. You can eve ask for feedback from your users directly from your application. Very nice new feature.

I will post some pictures of the slide later.

David did a quick demo of 4.0 and it looks like we are getting closer to a beta version. I just can't wait to get my hands on it :)

Ran back to Moscone to the APEX ask the expert panel. Again, some interesting discussions with the APEX team.

Today, more apex sessions and some hands on sessions.

As for the temperature in SFO, well, this year is colder than last year and I heard something about a storm tomorrow. We'll see. Hopefully, the sun should be back on wednesday in time for the appreciation event and the Aerosmith show.

OOW 09

2009-10-08T13:55:00.005-04:00

Time goes fast ... Already Openworld 09.

Just a quick post to say that I will be there again this year and I will attend most of the APEX presentations.

I also plan to give a presentation at the UnConference on wednesday morning about SAAS with APEX.

Like I usually do, I will keep this blog updated during the week with APEX and other Oracle related stuff that I will have the chance to see during my visit in San Francisco.

Michael Hichwa nominated for the Innovation Showcase

2009-09-28T14:38:00.002-04:00

I would like to congratulate Michael Hichwa for being nominated for the Innovation Showcase because of Application Express !

I am sure that he will win since APEX is really an innovation. You have my vote.

Read more here : http://www.oracle.com/innovation/innovator-michael-hichwa.html

Apex Meetup at OOW 09

2009-09-22T10:10:00.003-04:00

This year , the Apex Meetup will be on tuesday 7:30 PM at the Fourth Street Bar & Deli.

Check Dimitri's Blog for more details.

APEX Web Conference - Converting Access to APEX - Take 2

2009-09-18T10:08:00.002-04:00

The webconference has been moved to wednesday September 23rd.
So , you still have a chance to attend. To register, contact Marc Côté via e-mail at info @ insum . ca

The presentation is an overview of APEX and explains why and how to migrate an MS Access application to Oracle Application Express.

APEX Web Conference - Converting Access to APEX

2009-09-11T15:08:00.004-04:00

Converting Ms Access Applications

To Oracle Application Express (Apex)

LIVE WEB CONFERENCE

11 to noon ET
September 16, 2009

Microsoft Access might look suitable for a departmental application but for IT managers it is like a time bomb. Eventually, the super user that put it in place and manage it will leave your organization, or the data will suddenly be deemed sensitive, or a web interface will be needed or the application will need to grow to a larger number of users.

Oracle Application Express (APEX) presents an incredible alternative to MS Access with the added advantage of a 100% browser based environment where users are able to access their applications from any PC, and from any location together with the performance, security and scalability inherent to the Oracle database.

+ APEX COMES BUNDLED WITH EVERY ORACLE DATABASE !

MIGRATING FROM MS ACCESS TO ORACLE APEX

Insum Solutions is solely dedicated to Oracle Application Express. Since 2002, we are a one stop shop for customers across North America looking to create new applications or to migrate existing applications to APEX.

Building on real life customer applications, Insum Solutions has experienced the MS Access to APEX conversion process and is in a unique position to present and discuss the numerous benefits achieved by its customers who have gone that route and the best practices that help ensure a successful conversion project.

· Introduction to Oracle Application Express (APEX)

· APEX vs. ACCESS

· The steps to a successful migration

· Questions and Answers

Target Audience
IT Executives, VP Application development, Corporate Architecture & Project manager
Across all spectrum of the industry

Dates and Location
Wednesday, September 16, 11am ET

Leverage Insum Solutions experts to ensure a successful Access to APEX migration on your first attempt!

Oracle Application Express 4.0

2009-07-20T09:14:00.002-04:00

The presentation that Mike Hichwa gave at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 09 about APEX 4.0 is available here.

It explains all the nice new features of the next release of Oracle Application Express.

ODTUG 09 - Day 2,3,4

2009-06-30T10:28:00.014-04:00

I had to wait to get back home to post about ODTUG Kaleidoscope. Network connections were kinda hard to get and I was so busy attending conferences and networking with everyone.

So Here is the resume of the rest of my week at Kaleidoscope ODTUG 09 :

Day 2 - Monday

I tried to attend Tom Kyte's session but , it was full. Tom is very popular.

I attented Scott Spadafore session on APEX security essantials. He explained in details how we can prevent cross site scripting and were APEX has built-in filtering. He also talked about Session State Protection, session state protection and non-persistent password item types. I will have to read my notes and implement some of those security features.

The same day, Mike Hichwa presented APEX 4.0. All I can say is, wow. Tons of new features. Some of them I heard for the first time like built-in feature for REST Web Services. Also, the item plugin feature looks very promising as the comunity will be able to create new item types and share them.

I think that 4.0 will be an important step especially for those who are migrating from forms. The client side will be more rich since you will be able do implement AJAX declaratively (Dynamic Actions).

The APEX Meet-up was on monday night. This meet-up was the biggest by far. I counted 40 people. It is always fun the meet with old and new APEXcionados. The discussions always comes back to how cool this tool is and how the APEX community is great.

Day 3 - Tuesday

Attended Tom Kyte's session Database worst practices. This time I was early. Like always, his presentation are very good and right to the point.

Dietmar Aust presented Jasper reports integration with APEX. He showed how we can design very nice reports using a WYSIWYG editor. You have to install an appserver like tomcat and you can create reports using iReport. This is another thing that I have to try. We are currently using PL/PDF which is very good, but if you want something were it is easier to design, Jasper seems like a good alternative.

Dietmar mentioned that he would offer the integration kit for jasper reports for free. So keep an eye on his blog.

Roel Hartman session on how to integrate APEX and Oracle Forms was also very interesting. Roel showed us how he integrated a real form in an APEX page using iframes. He also explained how he got APEX and forms to communicate together. I think that this method could be useful if you are partially converting a FORMS application to APEX and if you had shared canevas between the OLD application and the new APEX application.

Brian Spendolini explained how we can build an APEX application on the iphone. Again, another thing that I have to try. Very interesting.

Tuesday evening , we had a great "Meet the Oracle Ace Reception". And also, I had a super great time playing Texas Hold'em with friends.

Day 4 - Wednesday (Quebec National Holiday june 24)

I attended the following sessions :

"Intelligent Data Exploration with APEX and OLAP" by Marty Gubar. He showed how to create drilled down reports on Oracle OLAP Cubes. Another good utility of APEX.

"Effectively Manageing an APEX instance using Resource Manager" by Joel Kallman. He explained how to create and maintain consumer groups to avoid having long running cpu intensive processes impacting the database. This is a very nice feature of the Enterprise Edition.

Then, it was my turn. gulp !
I talked about our Software As A Service and how we serve multiple companies with the exact same application. I showed some of the techniques that we use for having different looks and menus. So hopefully people learned something.

Day 5 - Thursday

Well, this was the last day. I was surprised to see how many people attended the last sessions.

I saw Patrick Cimolini "Developing a Rules and Guidelines document for APEX" session. For people like me that are more involved on the administrative side, this session was very interesting. He explained how they created development guidelines, standards and rules to have a team of developpers working on projects and delivering these projects on time and on budget. Basically, sometimes, you have to let go some of the cool stuff to be able to deliver on time.

Josh Millinger session "10 Easy ways to develop faster and more professionnaly with APEX" was also very popular. Lot of great tips to be more productive while developing with APEX. On of my favorite is : Don't try to re-invent the wheel. There are so many built-in features, especially for AJAX and Javascript.

So this is it. Now I have to get back to work.

It was nice to meet with everyone again. I had a lot of fun with other Canadians (Canapeans) fellows from Cognera in Calgary and with people from all around the world. Hopefully, we will have the chance to meet again at Oracle OpenWorld.

ODTUG 09 - Day 1

2009-06-22T14:11:00.006-04:00

On Sunday , it was the symposium Day !

It started with an APEX keynote from Joel Kallman. If you ever get the chance to see this presentation , don't miss it.

Joel was dead on with his talk about APEX being ahead of the curve. He showed some screenshots of FLOW (the ancester of Marvel, HTMLDB and finally APEX). In some degree , it was not so different than the current version. Sure, there are more features now but at that time you could already develop pages with wizards with only a browser and an Oracle database.

He made a parallel with the president Obama saying that like APEX , a couple of years ago, they both were
- Virtually Unknown
- Underestimated
- had "Grass root support"

He also talked about the SAAS (Software As A Service) and PAAS (Platform As A Service) approach of Oracle Application Express.

The community of APEX is also growing and growing. Here are some stats that Joel showed us :

Apex.Oracle.Com : 6.8M Pagesviews / week , 12k workspaces, 350/week
Apex Forum : 4.1M views, 45k threads, #3 on OTN
55 Blogs, 5 Books, 12 Hosting Partners, 80 consulting companies

Wow!.

The rest of the day was mostly customer stories. It was very interesting. Here are some stuff that I remember in no particular order :

The LAMP acronym is oftenly used for : Linux Apache MySQL PHP
Now there is the LAOS acronym for : Linux APEX OracleXE SQLDeveloper

Here is a Quote that I liked : "Customers want Holes , Not Drills ! " i.e. give the customer what they want , they don't really care about the technology used to do it. For example, do you care what google use for Gmail ? As long as you have access to your mail.

One presenter explained that by switching to the web, they made significant cost saving because they saved on training, it was less complex, easier to upgrade or add features, there was less keys used by using more on-mouse stuff so the clerks were more effective in their work.

David Peake anounced an APEX development competition. The contest ends in August and the winners will win a free pass for Oracle Openworld or a copy of John Scott APEX Book.

Today, there us going to have some more interesting sessions and one that is really expected is the APEX 4.0 session from Mike Hichwa. I will keep you posted.

ODTUG 09 - Day 0

2009-06-21T10:05:00.009-04:00

We arrived on Friday evening after a long day of waiting and flying.

On Saturday, we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It was very nice. We saw otters, sea horses and of course a lot of different kinf of fishes.

We saw the feeding show that you can also see on a web cam from home.

It was fun to see Roel , John and Monty again. I am looking forward to meet old friends and make some new friends this week at ODTUG Kaleidoscope. I heard that there will be about 700 people coming to the conference.

There is a twitter account for ODTUG if you want to follow what is going on. You can also filter on the #ODTUG tag. I think that this is a good idea for an event like this one.

I will try to post during the week. Especially after my session on wednesday (13:30 S243).

So, now, time for breakfast and the APEX Symposium.

ORA*GEC golf tournament

2009-06-05T10:02:00.005-04:00

Ok for those of you that thought we were always all about bits and bytes and APEX geeks, well you were wrong and here is to prove it.

On june 2nd it was the ORA*GEC golf tournament in Montreal and our team shined (more than the sun itself on that windy day !!!).

On this picture from left to right: Michel St-Amour Insum President, Patrick Bonneville VP Development, Patrick Bélanger Product Development Manager and crouched on her putter, Brigitte Lafond Senior consultant (and the best golfer of the four !!!).

We didn’t only register a competitive team we also sponsored a hole for the benefit of the ORA*GEC community (90 players).

On the 17th hole each participant received a travel bag embroiled with the Insum logo. They also were invited to participate in a contest. In order to register for the draw of a 1TB external hard drive each foursome needed to beat our Business Development Manager (Marc Cote on the picture with Brigitte) by placing one of their 4 balls closer to the pin than Marc’s ball.

Not too many did !!! Which prompted some good laughs about such a marketing scheme where the objective is to beat your customer or prospect on the golf course !!

All our happy golfers are now back to work as June is warming up for us in more ways than none.

Thanks to Marc Côté, director business development, for this resume.

Forms to APEX Workshop follow-up

2009-05-28T16:14:00.003-04:00

On May 20th Insum Solutions hosted an APEX seminar followed by a workshop on How to migrate Oracle Forms to Oracle APEX using the migration engine. The session took place in Oracle’s office in Montreal (participants were spoiled with a great breakfast and lunch generously offered by Oracle).

For the most part, participants (15) were business analysts and DBA from the public/parapublic sector. Some of them were coming from organizations where APEX was actively used to develop new applications. Some were new to APEX altogether.

Serge Tremblay, Oracle Solutions Specialist for Oracle Technologies kickoff the session and delivered a strong presentation on the positioning of APEX within the overall offering of Oracle development platform. In short he insisted that APEX had all the horsepower required to deliver enterprise scale applications. Also along this line Serge explained how an APEX application could be deployed in a fail proof environment . Insisting on the fact that APEX cost efficient deployment option is not a limitation and should not be marked as a disadvantage. If more robustness is required than all the options are there to put in place a application that could provide high availability in a 24/7 capability.

Michel St-amour, Insum president, followed Serge on the podium and provide answers to : Why migrate, How to evaluate and manage a migration project. Insisting on this last concept – Migrating from Oracle Forms to APEX must be considered a project and managed as such (although there is a migration engine).

After a networking lunch, we changed gears and started the workshop session. Participants were instructed to log on our server to download the required files and to connect to Insum APEX training application. The whole afternoon went very smoothly. The session was led by Brigitte Lafond, Senior consultant at Insum. Brigitte is also the one who had crafted an exhaustive document (65 pages !) to help guide the users step by step on how to proceed. To ensure everyone had the proper attention on this first delivery of our migration workshop, we also had Eric Boissonnault, another consultant at Insum, in the room to help Brigitte answer participants questions.

At 3:30 we wrapped things up with the participants. General comments were that the session was quite helpful, instructive and provided a good eye opener on the possibilities of both APEX and the migration engine. Also re-confirmed by all was that migrating from Oracle Forms to APEX must be managed as a project (no magic button) and a first project should always be led by experienced consultant ( which was music to our hears)

To make sure Oracle Enterprise customers could have a chance to participate in a similar session, we have agreed with Oracle Montreal office representatives to hold a similar session in the September timeframe.

Thanks to Marc Côté, director business development, for this resume.

Collaborate 09 - Wrap up

2009-05-11T14:38:00.007-04:00

Here is a resume of the rest of my week at Collaborate 09 in Orlando :

On wednesday, I attended a session on new 11g Features by Rich Niemic of TUSC.

When we were waiting for people to come in , he showed us this clip from youtube that I think is very funny :

He talked about some new features of 11G that can help reduce your work and give better services to your customers. (Everything is Amazing and nobody is Happy). It is surprising how many new features there are in 11G. I realized that I should read more about them and experiment to see how I could use them.

I also attended John Scott's presentation on Dispelling Myths about APEX. I already saw this presentation at Open World '08 and it is a good one. John talked about all the famous myths that we keep earing on APEX and explains why they are Myths. The one that I ear quite often is that APEX was build from WEBDB. Wich is not true at all. APEX is not WEBDB and does not even share code. And there are a lot of myths. This is a must see APEX presentation.

On wednesday night, we had (IOUG Attendees) exclusive access to Universal Island of Adventure. It was cool. Plenty of food and access to all the rides. I did the "Dueling Dragons" and I think that it is the best roller coaster I ever been on.

On thursday morning it was my turn. On the last day , the morning after the big Party. Still, I got a good audience and I think that it went great. At least, nobody fell asleep or left the room in the middle of my presentation :) I talked about building one application for multiple customers. I show how we dynamically generate different looks and menus at each page views. I got some good questions from the audience. You can see Dimitri's review of my presentation on his blog.
I think that I show a new way on how APEX can be used. The fact that APEX generates every pages at each pageviews makes APEX a perfect choice for a multi-tenant SAAS.

Right after my presentation, there was Dimitri's What happens on an APEX Page?. He showed the options available from the selectlist "View" on an APEX page. Sometimes, it is worth the time exploring those "not so obvious" options. They can be very useful. Again, very good presentation from Dimitri.

Well, that was it for Orlando and Collaborate 09.

Next conference : ODTUG Kaleidoscope in june.

Oracle Application Express Master

2009-05-11T09:46:00.003-04:00

Just saw this video from Jeff Erikson on his Tech Spectator blog.

It is about APEX. Very funny.

Also check out his blog , you will find another good video about Oracle Application Express

Have fun !

Collaborate 09 - Peabody Ducks

2009-05-06T10:23:00.014-04:00

You probably are asking yourself why I am talking about Ducks in the title of this post. Well, you'll see.

During the last two days, I attended some interesting sessions at Orlando for IOUG Collaborate 09.

There was one session by Tony Jedlinsky about Amazon EC2 Cloud computing. His presentation was well done and showed a step by step setup of an APEX installation on the Amazon Cloud. Very interesting and good pointers.

I also saw David Peake's Forms to APEX conversion. I already saw this presentation a couple of times but now that APEX 3.2 is available, there was a bit more details than the last one I saw. You can see an overview of the Forms conversion on OTN.

Another good presentation was the overview of the SQLDeveloper datamodeling tool by Sue Harper.

But one of the most intriguing one was the APEX Architechture Review by Paul Dorsey. Intriguing in the sense that it was kind of hard to understand the overall message that he was trying to pass to the audience. Was it that there was some flaws to APEX or that APEX was a good tool or that ADF was too complex ?

But, however, I think that it was an interesting presentation in the sense that it added new arguments to debate about. From my opinion, it showed a perspective from the type of APEX user that does not have the time , or the chance, to go in more depth with APEX and base their evaluation of the product on what they first see. I find that this is the beauty of the tool in a way. You can quickly create functional applications but after you can customize about almost anything. And this takes a bit of time and programming efforts.

You can find more details and more discussions about Paul Dorsey's presentation on Dimitri's Blog.

One thing that disapointed me at Collaborate is that there was at least three APEX sessions that were canceled. I hope that these presentations will be at ODTUG Kaleidoscope.

Now about the Ducks :

I am staying at the Peabody hotel, and beleive it or not, there is a Duck parade every day.

It was very funny to see this ritual with the music and the Crimson-and-gold- braid-jacketed Duck Master...

This made my day ! :)

New Blog for Insum Solutions.

2009-05-01T08:41:00.004-04:00

I would like to welcome Michel St-Amour to the blogging community.

http://insum-solutions.blogspot.com/

This is our new corporate blog.

Michel will talk about Insum and the Oracle Application Express market in general.
It will be interesting to have a view on APEX other than technical.

Since his blog is targeted to our local community in Montreal, it will be in French.
If I see something that will be of interest to others, I will be more than happy to translate it and post it here.

IOUG - Collaborate 09

2009-04-27T08:28:00.003-04:00

This week , I am in preparation of the IOUG Collaborate 09 in Orlando.

I will be presenting on how to build a SAAS (Software As A Service) with APEX.

I can't wait to share some of our technical tips on generating web pages dynamically wit Oracle Application Express.

I will be showing how we manage to have more than 20 differents companies using the exact same application and having different looks and contents.

There will be other APEX conferences and I hope that I will be able to attend all of them.

It will be fun to meet with everyone from the APEX community again.

It is my first time at Collaborate, so I don't know what it is going to be like. It is a big convention with over 7000 people attending. It should be fun and a good networking event.

My presentation is on thursday , may 7 at 8:30.

I will keep you posted on how it went and I am also planning on blogging in more details on some of my presentation content.

So, See you in Florida, Oralando !

Forms to APEX Conversion Workshop

2009-04-20T10:54:00.006-04:00

Insum will be hosting a Forms to APEX conversion workshop on May 20th in Montreal.

This session will be in French, so the rest of this post will be in French.

Le mercredi 20 mai prochain, en collaboration avec Oracle, nous allons tenir un atelier sur la conversion d'applications Oracle Forms vers Oracle Application Express.

L’objectif de cet atelier est de démontrer comment fonctionne la migration d’un écran d’Oracle Forms vers APEX. On y soulignera les différences entre les deux technologies et on démontrera les avantages de choisir APEX comme outil de développement.

Voici les détails :

Mercredi 20 mai 2009

De 8 h 30 à 16 h 00

600 boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest Suite 1910 , Montréal (Québec) H3A 3J2 - Oracle Montréal.

Pour réserver, veuillez envoyer un courriel à Nina Di Nunzio à l’adresse nina.di.nunzio@oracle.com

Vous trouverez plus d'information sur notre site web : http://insum.ca/w/fr/atelier.php

ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009 - APEX

2009-03-13T13:23:00.003-04:00

This year , I will be presenting at ODTUG Kaleidoscope. I will be talking about : How to Build a Multi-tenant SaaS Application with Oracle Application Express.

It's my third ODTUG (First time as a speaker), and all I can say is that if you are looking for technical information about APEX and if you want to meet with the Oracle APEX community, this IS THE place.

There are 33 sessions on Oracle Application Express.

There are also other interesting sessions on different Oracle technologies.

APEX AT KALEIDOSCOPE 2009 BY THE NUMBERS

42 hours of technical education
38 technical sessions
33 APEX sessions
31 technical experts presenting
6 hands on training classes
1 full-day in-depth Symposium

Visit www.odtugkaleidoscope.com for more registration and more information

If you have the choice of only one conference to attend this year, I would recommend this one.

New release of Oracle Application Express - Apex 3.2

2009-03-02T07:58:00.003-05:00

The new release of Oracle Application Express 3.2 is now available for download on http://apex.oracle.com.

This new release includes the Oracle Forms to Apex conversion tool but also new security features.

There is also a new look to the apex.oracle.com page.

Congrats to the Apex Team ! I just can't wait for Apex 4.0 ;)
Keep up the good work.

Forms Conversion

2009-02-19T11:36:00.004-05:00

I tought that I should blog about what is going on since I did not had time to blog since the beginning of the year.

In January, we started a Forms Conversion to Apex proof of concept project. One of our customer is looking for an alternative to forms 4.5 and gave us the opportunity to produce some metrics on converting to Apex.

Luckily, we were also part of the Apex 3.2 Beta testing.

Our customer gave us a sample of forms modules and we converted them in APEX.

Here is a resume of our approach :

1- convert form module to 10g
2- convert the module to XML
3- Load the XML in APEX
4- Use the Apex Migration utility to identify and analyze the modules (especially the triggers)
5- manually convert the triggers in PL/SQL and Javascript

In a period of one to two weeks, we were able to convert most of the forms including security and menus.

There are some things that you should be aware of when converting to Apex from forms :

1- It is not an automated process i.e. the conversion is not done automatically for you
2- You have to know Forms to be able to read and analyze the code
3- Triggers can be hard to convert especially when it is old sql coding.
4- Some forms fonctionality have to be reproduced differently in a web environment. EX: Master/detail/detail , key-dup-rec, when-validate-item etc...

So, we think that Apex can be used to replace Forms without any problems. For sure, end users have to be trained to learn the new ways of using their system. But , all in all, using a web system these days is more intuitive than understanding Enter-Query and Execute-Query :)

I think that Apex 4.0 will also help for converting since Apex tabular forms and client side validations (Javascript/Ajax) will be part of this release and those two things are widely used in Forms.

If you want to try the Apex3.2 Migration tool, you can on Apex.Oracle.Com

Top Ten SAAS Dos and Don'ts

2008-12-04T15:35:00.002-05:00

I know that this post is again related to SAAS (Software As A Service). Actually, it has some relations with APEX for since we are mixing both.

Apex is a good development tool for SAAS. Not just because it is secure and scalable, but also because the web applications are generated dynamically. So , customizing each pages for each requirements is easier with APEX than using other traditionnal development tools.

Anyway, the other reason that I blog about SAAS again is that I am preparing for my ODTUG presentation about building multi-tenant SAAS applications with Oracle Application Express.

Here is a good PDF document listing the top ten DOs and Don'ts when providing SAAS. We have been working with our Adsum SAAS product for over 5 years now and I find that this document is very accurate.

SAAS Overview

2008-11-27T15:53:00.003-05:00

Here is a small video that I found on Youtube explaining what is SAAS (Software As A Service)

WEB 2.0 with Apex and JQuery

2008-11-17T09:02:00.003-05:00

We decided at Insum that we had to investigate a bit more on the "ajax / jquery / javascript " to give our users a better experience.

How do you let your users move regions in a page ? How do you implement that "Working ..." image when your page is submitted ? How do you create modal pop-up windows ? etc ...
Those are all questions that we asked ourselves and were looking for answers.

Well, we started where Carl told us to : JQuery.

Check out our demo application at www.insum.ca/jquery . As we try and find different web2.0 things, we will post the results of our findings there.

At the same time that this is a central refrence for us, I hope that it will help some of you trying to do the same.

we are also open for comments and questions. Feel free to participate either in the forum, or on our blogs.

Francis.

Abstract Selected for ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009

2008-11-13T11:05:00.003-05:00

Good news. My abstract has been selected for ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009 !

I am very happy. That means a lot of work ahead for me, but I think (and Hope) that it will bring a new perspective on APEX to the community.

The title of my presentation is : How to build a multi-tenant SAAS application with Oracle Application Express.

I will show some of the techniques that we use for our own SAAS application. I hope that it will also convince people to start using Apex for commercial applications.

Another conference to add to your Agenda !

Apexposed - OPP

2008-11-05T10:47:00.007-05:00

I was in Chicago on the 29-30 of October 2008 for the Apexposed conference.

Again, it was very interesting to see all those presentations. There is always new ways of integrating Apex with different technologies.

See all the conferences about Apex with other technologies :
- Integrating PL/Flow with Apex by Scott Stegemann
- Yahoo UI and Jquery with Apex by Tim St. Hilaire
- Integrating Apex and Web Services by Jason Straub
- Integrating Apex with DHTMLX Tree by Bharat Pappu

On the first morning, Scott Spendolini did his 408 slides presentation. Very entertaining. It was funny to see those old technologies that we used back than and the corrolation with today's technology. After that, Mike Hichwa presented some new features coming in the 4.0 release of Apex next year.

Scott Spendolini Payed a tribute to Carl Backstrom on the second morning during his Keynote. I think that it was very appropriate and that it had to be mentioned.

At the same time, his "Avoiding APEX Pitfalls" was very educating. He talked about how to deal with political issues when trying to get people to adopt Apex. I agree with him when he says that the adoption of a new technology is 10% technical and 90% political.

I had the chance to network with different people and is is always motivating to discuss the possibilities of Apex with them.

Another presentation that I liked was Steven Feuerstein's : "A Solid PL/SQL Foundation for Apex Developers". Basically, APEX has to be treated as any other PL/SQL development and Database Packages should be used in PL/SQL APEX Processes to ease maintenance and tuning.

So, this trip was short and sweet. Fly in and fly out of Chicago . I would have liked to visit downtown but the Hotel was a bit too far. So maybe another time.

ODTUG is a great association and I think that they are listening to their members and reacting in a good way. All I can say to them is "keep up the good work".

I submitted an abstract for the ODTUG Kaleidoscope next year. Who knows, maybe I will be presenting. The subject of my presentation is : How to build a multi-tenant SAAS application with Oracle Application Express.

Can't wait to see if it will be accepted.

Goodbye Carl

2008-10-28T08:31:00.007-04:00

I just can't believe it ! I just heard the news about Carl Backstrom.

Carl, we will miss you.

He was a really friendly person and a great guy. Always ready to help the community.

I am shocked. This is a big loss.

My condolences to his family.

Francis.

My week at Oracle Open World - Part 3 (Final)

2008-10-08T20:18:00.026-04:00

Wednesday September 25

Yep, after this long day and after spending a lot of energy stressed about the presentation, well, it was time for Party !

This year, the appreciation event was on the Treasure Island in SFO. Treasure Island is a man-made atoll located in the middle of San Francisco Bay and just beneath the San Francisco Bay Bridge.

For the occasion, there was some thrill rides , arcades and two stages with live performances. It's my second OpenWorld and again, it was incredible. As last year, there was a lot of food and drinks. What a nice party.

Here are some pictures of the event :

Thursday September 26

After a short night, I attendted Jonh Scott's presentation "Dispelling Myths About Oracle Application Express" . Of all the presentation I saw during the week, I think that this one was one of my favourite. Why ? Because, we have been using APEX for more than 4 years now and we used it in all kinds of architectures, applications, configurations and it is working very well but, when you talk to your customers about Apex, they do not believe us when we say that this new tool is : a good tool, it scales, it's web enabled, it's secure, it's simple. Everything today is so complicated that when you say "well, all you need is an oracle database" the customer says "What's the catch ?" "Can it scale", "Will Oracle support it", "If it's free it's not good", "It's not a proven technology" .

Well, Scott did a good job in listing all of those myths and dispelled them one by one. Nice job. If you have the chance to see that presentation, go. It's worth it. Especially for the Apex timeline that he shows . It's surprising to see for how long this product (Apex) has been there. Longer than you think...

Later, at the end of the day, I saw "Building a Web 2.0 Interface with Oracle Application Express" by Mark Lancaster. Another good presentation explaining AJAX and Javascript with Apex. You can find examples on his Blog. I especially liked his story about his water cooling machine. It's a long story but it short, Technology is simple but it still takes experienced people to help you get the best out of it.

Friday September 27

Well, that was my last day in SFO and we went visiting Alacatraz , Fisherman's warf and Pier 39. We also did a last ride in the Cable Car.

With so many new things in my mind, I now have to find a way to communicate everything to my team here in Montreal.

Francis.

My week at Oracle Open World - Part 2

2008-10-05T15:35:00.049-04:00

Wednesday September 25

Wednesday was a big day for me. I was going to be part of a presentation for the first time at OOW !
I was a bit nervous since I had nothing prepared. The fact that English is not my native language added to the nervousness. But it was a round table and we were there to just talk about our experience with APEX in a Software as a sevice (SAAS) environment and answer questions from the audience.

So, in the morning, I attended the "Soup-to-Nuts RAD Development Using Oracle SQL Developer and Oracle Application Express" presentation by Mike Hichwa and David Peake.

We had a preview of the data modeler tool that will be integrated in SQL Developer. It looks very promising and at last, we will be able to easyly publish our data model and compare different schemas via SQL Developper. I think that people that are currently using designer only for the modeling part will rapidly switch to this new tool.

here is a snapshot of what it looks like :

There was also a demo of APEX and the Forms conversion tool.

After that we took a look at the Demo ground and Exhibition Hall and went to lunch.

We then decided to go to Larry's Keynote. I think that it is a must see for people attending OOW.
We had to wait in line an hour before. There was a lot of people there ! But it was worth the wait.

Larry officially launched the Exadata storage servers in partneship with HP. Very interesting piece of equipement.

After the Keynote , it was my turn, I was a speaker in the "S300458 - Building commercial Software-As-A-Service (SAAS) applications with Oracle Application Express" presentation.

So we went back to Moscone South. I think that the presentation went pretty well. We were six on the Panel and David Peake hosted the roundtable. Our product was a bit different than the others since our SAAS solution is a CRM but also generates dynamically the public websites of our customers. All this in the same multi tenant APEX application.

The participants of the roundtable were :

Jim Brull, Centroid
Doug Gault, Hotsos
Francis Mignault, Insum Solutions
Anton Nielsen, C2Consulting
Paulo Vale, Neoface
Dennis Vanill, Paetec

I really liked to exchange on the SAAS topic with the other panellists. In a way, we all share the sames issues and they are not only technical issues.

Our solution is an integrated Association Management service. We host the application on our servers and our clients uses it to maintain their membership database. With only a web browser, they have access to an application that stores the information of all their members and suppliers in one single place. They can print members cards, print labels, follow their communications, renew the memberships automatically, generate public and private web pages, list the activities, allow on-line subscription, interface with their accounting system and produce different reports.

We also provide a job offer system where external suppliers can post job offers themselves and the result is automatically sent to all the members on a daily basis.

They can generate mailing lists, members can print and pay their invoices on-line. They can also update their profile on-line. The general public can query the members database with specific criterias.

It is even possible to display ads on their web-sites through a user friendly interface. This is really the beauty of our solution since our software become a source of revenue for the association. Not only it allows associations to give a better service to their members by communicating the information more rapidly, it eases the burdon of having to maintain and support the software and the hardware. It also reduces the manual administration of the association by automating a lot of the business processes.

It is a management system for Assoctions memberships with some content management.

Our customers benefits of an up-to-date software at all time. We constantly add new features and everyone using the software gets those features automatically. It's a living software without having to worry about upgrades, licenses and technical issues.

The application also make extensive use of the globalization functionalities integrated in APEX. That allows us to offer a bilingual (French and English) software.

We host our SAAS in a secure environment with a redundant database on a remote site and by doing so our service is reliable and always available.

All this using Oracle Application Express. Because APEX is scalable (we currently support over 60 000 user accounts) and because the architecture is simple (Oracle database only) this allow us to offer our solution at an affordable price without any worries.

We have a dedicated team that are working exclusively on support and maintenance of our product.

To find out more about our SAAS solution, you can check our website at www.insum.ca

You can check some of our customers sites here on the right of my blog : "Websites using our SAAS product (Association Management Software)"

We are also listed on the Oracle Apex website in the Commercial Applications section.

I really enjoyed this session. I would like to thank the other participants and especially Da vid Peake who made this possible.

If you are thinking about a SAAS hosted solution made with Oracle Aplication EXpress and you don't know where to start, need help or if you have any questions, feel free to send me an e-mail .

You can download the powerpoint presentation here.

Next post will be about My week at OOW Part 3 (final) ...

More to come : Appreciation Event, Seal, UB40, Alcatraz , Web 2.0 with APEX and John Scott presentation : Myths about Oracle application express ...

Francis.

My week at Oracle Open World - Part 1

2008-10-01T10:51:00.031-04:00

Again, this year, it was very impressive being part of Oracle Open World.
The city was painted in Red and there was Oracle logos everywhere, on the sidewalks, on the busses , on the taxis, literally everywhere.

Here are the higlights of my week in SFO (PART 1 ):

Saturday September 20th
We arrived in San Francisco on Saturday , the flight was ok and everything went smoothly. This year, my colleague Patrick was part of the trip. It was fun being able to share those moments with someone. After our registration , in order to get in the mood of the city, we decided to go for a Cable Car ride and go check Fishermans Warf.

Sunday September 21st
Now it was time for the real thing. Meeting again with Apex related friends. It's always nice to see everyone again .
So we started the day with the "Oracle Application Express SIG: Ask the Experts (IOUG)" session where the panel discussed and answered questions about Apex. It would be a good idea to have this session at the end of the week after all the Apex sessions. Maybe next year.

After I attended the session : "Using Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Application Express to Change Business Practices and Realize ROI" by Anton Neilsen. It was again very interesting to hear real life situations where Apex was used and where the time constraints where very high. Another success story about using Apex and delivering a stable application in a record time.

And then, it was time for Joel Kallman presentation about Globalization. We, at Insum, do use this feature a lot. Here in Montreal, our customers are both French and English speaking. And let me tell you that this is just a great feature. It's not only about translation but about globalization itself. Things like date formats and NLS formats are all available declaratively in Apex out of the box. Today with the web and the opening to the rest of the world ( Open. World ;) ) , I think that this is a must. So again, another great APEX presentation.

During the day, I also had the chance to meet with Paulo Vale. We where both participating in the round table about SAAS with APEX. It is always fun to meet in person with people you only knew through their blog.

We had a lot to share about hosted apex applications. Very interesting to have other points of view. Sometimes, even if you are in different countries and speaking different languages, a lot of things are similar. Especially when you are in the same line of business and using the same technology.

I finished the day at the Welcome Reception. Food, drinks and live music. What more can you ask for ?

Monday September 22nd

On monday morning, it was back to the conferences.

Running from the Mariott Hotel to the Moscone Center West , to Moscone South. That was good exercise.

I attended Deb Groskreutz's presentation "Rapid Development/Validation of Oracle Application Express APplications at an FDA-Regulated Medical Device Firm". Another good real life example of using Apex in projects with limited time and resources.

I also attended Roel Hartman's presentation about "Developing a Real-World Logistic Application with Oracle Application Express". Roel showed some interesting stuff using Ajax and Apex togheter.

On monday, there was also the much expected presentation about "Migrating from Oracle Forms to Oracle Application Express" by David Peake.

I think that this is very interesting. There was a lot of people attending this presentation since I think that most of them already looked at the java opportunity but are still looking for easier path to the web. David did say that Forms will NOT be desupported short term. He also said that this is not a silver bullet solution but a conversion project. That means that it will not convert everything automatically since client-server and web applications are not the using the same approach and functionalities. But this is a great tool to help moving to a web environment. Looks pretty promising and we can't wait to start using it.

Another interesting conference was the "Oracle Application Express Mashup". I learned what a mashup was.

Check out this microsoft product called Photosynth . I also learned about Dapper , Popfly and Yahoo Pipes. You can use all those tools in an Apex application. Oracle Application Express is really opened to all kinds of web technologies. That is very cool stuff.

To finish the day, we went to see Carl Backstrom's presentation "Web 2.0 Development with Oracle Application Express" . I already saw this presentation at ODTUG but this time Carl talked about some new features coming out in 4.0 like the Dynamic Actions (cool). Again, a great presentation. You can check his blog to download the example application. I really like the idea of having access to the tools used to build Apex. With Apex, you have the declarative side and the under the hood side. It's a bit like mini-wheats ! So having access to those low level procedures gives you the opportunity to build what you want. I have some catch up to do with JSON and with javascript. A lot of studying ahead...

And the day finished at the OTN Night. Food, drinks and games ...

Tuesday September 23

On tuesday, after a short night, we started with Tom Kyte's keynote "The Best Way... "

He really has a good approach on how to deal with problems and how to think "Out of the box".

As always, very good presentation. It was nice to attend something not too technical. There were some very nice and funny quotes. I don't remember all of them but one of them goes something like : "One best pratice is NOT to have best practices" , meaning that you cannot rely on best practices with your eyes closed since things are evolving and changing overtime.

Another interesting presentation, was "The Power of the Oracle Application Express Repository" by Patrick Wolf. Patrick showed us the path to heaven ;) Very nice and funny presentation. He explained that with the Apex Repository, you can do a lot of things like QA and even unsupported updates directly in the metadata.

We finished the day at the Apex Meetup. Thanks Dimitri for organizing the meetup !

This time it was drinks, food and friends.

Next post will be about My week at OOW Part 2 ...

I still have some interesting things to talk about : Exadata, Larry Ellison, Appreciation Event, Seal, UB40, Alcatraz , Me at the SAAS Apex presentation ...

Francis.

APEX for complex and serious applications

2008-09-05T11:44:00.005-04:00

When we meet with customers and explain to them that Oracle Application Express is great tool and that it can actually be used for their application development, the comment that we hear the most is : "Apex is made for small applications only ! ".

Why ? Well I think that is beacuse of the way that Apex was initially sold, an MS Access replacement (Maybe Oracle Sales also tend to push IAS a bit more...)

Having used APEX (Htmldb) since version 1.5 (April 2004), I can certify that Apex can compare with pretty much any other development software out there. It is scalable, it is easy to use and it is easy to install/upgrade.

During Openworld 2008, I will be part of a round table about SAAS and APEX. We currently support over 40000 user accounts and 20 different customers public web sites on a single APEX instance. Come see us, I will be more than glad to meet and discuss about APEX with you.

You still don't believe that APEX can be used for building complex applications ? Well, check out Tom Kyte blog post on the Oracle Application Express book, that should convince you.

Francis.

ApEx Calendar - enhanced behavior

2008-07-08T15:05:00.020-04:00

Hi,

A long time ago [read htmldb 1.5], I made an application that can manage appointments. I was using the monthly calendar to show a summary for everyday. I had to make my own daily calendar. Thanks to the ApEx dev team for improving the built-in calendar so now we have 3 different view: monthly, weekly, and daily.

Unfortunatly, the functionnality I was looking for isn't implemented yet. I wanted to be able to click in a cell of a monthly calendar and be redirected to the daily calendar of this day. From the daily view, I wanted to be able to click in a cell of an hour and be redirected to a form where the selected date and time would have been pre-entered in a date picker item.

Knowing Apex, I know I could quickly come up with something.

Here's the solution:

1) Create a calendar report.

For my exemple, I will add to page 5 a calendar region of type SQL Calendar.

N.B. The SQL query entered will be used by the 3 differents views (monthly, weekly, and daily).

2) Modify the monthly calendar template.

Make a copy of the existing calendar template so we can modify it without impacting anything.
We want to be able to click in a cell of a monthly calendar and be redirected to the daily calendar. We have to add a call to the JavaScript function redirect on every day cell of the calendar.

We have 4 HTML tags to modify.
-Monthly Calendar > Weekday Formats > Day Open Format
-Monthly Calendar > Weekday Formats > Today Open Format
-Monthly Calendar > Non-Day Formats > Non-Day Open Format
-Monthly Calendar > Weekend Formats > Weekend Open Format

3) Create a JavaScript function called calendarRedirect

Add this JavaScript code to your page HTML Header. Basically, this function finds the hour of the row and adds it at the end of the URL received in parameter. When I add the time at the end of the URL, I remove the ":" and replace them with "-". We will have to do the inverse process before putting the value in a date picker item.

4) Modify the daily calendar template.

We want to be able to click in a cell of a an hour and be redirected to a form.
We have to add a call to the JavaScript function calendarRedirect on every hour cell of the calendar.

We have 2 HTML tags to modify.
-Daily Calendar > Weekday Formats > Day Open Format
-Daily Calendar > Weekday Formats > Today Open Format

5) Formatting the date+time for the date picker item.

The date+time passed in the URL might not have the format your date picker item needs.
Simply add an item computation on the target page.

6) Enjoy.

ApEx calendar demo

Technocrati Registration

2008-07-07T11:20:00.001-04:00

Technorati Profile

Oracle OpenWorld 2008

2008-06-30T21:20:00.004-04:00

Well, This year, I will be attending OOW 2008.

The good news is that I will be part of a conference about SAAS and Oracle Application Express.

See the details here :

http://www28.cplan.com/cc208/catalog.jsp?ilc=208-1&ilg=english&isort_sessions=&isort_demos=&isort_exhibitors=&is=yes&ip=%3C%2Fipresentations%3E&isort_sessions_type=&isort_exhibitors_type=&isort_demos_type=&search_sessions=yes&icriteria2=+&icriteria5=+&icriteria1=+&icriteria8=&icriteria9=+&icriteria6=S300458&icriteria3=+&icriteria7=

We have been using APEX for our Association software that we host. So far, we have 19 customers using it and it is running like a charm.

You can get more details here : http://www.insum.ca
and in the Apex Commercial Applications page on OTN.

There is already 16 conferences about Oracle Application Express planned at OpenWorld.
Some of them seems very interesting (I will attend for sure) :
- Migrating from Oracle Forms to Oracle Application Express
- Oracle Application Express and Oracle XML Database: A Match Made in the Database
- Soup-to-Nuts RAD Development Using Oracle SQL Developer and Oracle Application Express

Francis

ODTUG 2008 - (resume of my week in New Orleans)

2008-06-24T15:47:00.016-04:00

I will not explain all the details of all the APEX presentations that I saw in New Orleans since others do that quite well.

All I can say is that Oracle Application Express is more popular that last year. Some conferences , I had to stay in the door since there was no place left in the room to sit.

My highlights are :

1- Sunday symposium .

Scott Spendolini did a very good presentation presenting 400 slides in about 20 minutes. Very good and very funny. He talked about some of the early versions of Oracle tools and bring back good memories ...

Mike Hichwa presented some of the new features that will be in the next releases. I did not had time to note them all up but one thing is for sure, I can't wait ... He also talked about Websheets wich is somekind of APEX lite. Very promising.

The presentation from Vista Technology (Bharat) was also very interesting. Knowing that the Army is using APEX means that Apex can be used for enterprised applications.

The presentation from Rich Mutell was great. This time we got the chance to get the point of view of a end user (not IT). It was really constructive.

Dietmar presentation was also very interesting. He talked about how the could develop rapidly an application for a big telecom company. Again, a good experience with APEX for an enterprise application.

2- Apex presentations

I will not go in detail but there was a lot of Apex presentations. Here are my favorites :

Apex Best Practices , John Scott

top 10 of things to do in APEX .

Apex 3.1 , David Peake

Especially the last 15 minutes about forms converter to APEX. We saw a small demo and it is very promising.

Go Global with Oracle Application Express, Joel Kallman

Using the globalization feature in APEX quite a lot, this presentation was of interest for me. Very good presentation and people should be aware of this feature a bit more since being on the web means being multilingual. And Apex can handle that quite well.

Creating Advanced Charts in APEX, Dimitri Gielis

I knew about charts but I did not really had the chance to play with it. This presentation was a good overview on what can be done with charts in APEX.

How to hack an Oracle Application Express Application , Anton Nielsen

This was a very good presentation and it showed some of the things to be careful with when we code with APEX. Anton is a good presenter and I would have like to see the whole presentation since he did not had time to finish it. Anyway, people using APEX and doing web developement should be aware of these security issues and learn how to make sure their application can be made more secure.

Building the New stuff: AJAX, JSON and APEX 3.1, Carl Backstrom

Very intersting. Carl showed us how we can implement AJAX in our APEX application. I can't wait to get my hands on that sample application. That is the beauty of APEX, it is declarative and you get applications up and running very rapidly but you also have access to all the nice things "under the hood" to build your own nice interfaces. very cool.

3- Non APEX presentations

I also attended some Non Apex presentations ;) Even if I was there mostly for the APEX stuff , I attended some others presentations.

I especially like the one about BI Publisher by Eric Marcoux and the one about PL/SQL webservices.

I attended a presentation about SOA but it was a bit too theorical (I prefer when it is a bit more technical). I am sure that we can do SOA with APEX. I really would like to have some real life examples about SOA with APEX. anyway.

I also had the chance to participate at an Oracle Development Tools Usability. It is interesting to participate and have a chance to express our experience with Oracle tools. During this session, we had to discuss about how Oracle can make our life easier with using their tools. This was a first for me and I will probably participate again if they ask me.

4- New Orleans, Burbon Street, French Quarter.

Well, this part is more about walking around in the city. I did not go very far from the Hotel but still was very nice to see a bit of New Orleans. It was also great to hang out with the others APEX afficionados ;) .

The temperature was very hot and humid.

The Sheraton hotel where ODTUG 2008 was held is on Canal Street.

I also had some great cigars at the New Orleans Cigar Factory .

One of those old boats on the missipi river.

You are allowed to drink on the streets but ...

(You can even get some Big Ass Beer LOL )

They call it the French Quarter ... but I think that they forgot how to write in French :) (My English is probably worst ...)

I Love those tramways . I think that is a very good thing for those cities . We used to have some in Montreal but we don't anymore. Maybe someday in the future.

I can't wait for the next conference to see how people are using APEX in their day to day work.

As always , people from the Apex team are very available and this is very appreciated.

I think that there is a place for every technologies and that there should not be a war between Apex and other tools. If you know PL SQL and HTML then Apex may be the tool for you. At least, you should give it a try. It's there in your database, so why not try it ?

I would like to see a comparaison with other technologies (not a shoot out) to see the pros and cons. Like how much does it cost , how secure, how scalable, how easy is it to install, how easy is it to maintain, what kind of architecture , What is the expertise required etc

How does it compares with PHP , ADF , Ruby , Forms , .Net , Delphi etc...

I also have to mention that I met a lot of peolple from around the world. That in itself was worth the trip. I've met some very nice people and I can't wait to meet them again. Maybe at Openworld in San Francisco !

ODTUG

2008-06-12T10:03:00.003-04:00

Just a quick post to let you know that I will be at the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference next week.

I can't wait to see all those presentations about APEX.

We have a SaaS Apex application (Software as a Service) and I would be very curious to find out if there any other offering this kind of service with APEX (.

Also, I am very curious to find out how APEX can be used in an SOA architecture.

I will keep you posted.

Can't wait also to see what New Orleans looks like ;)

See you there ...

Francis.

APEX SIG presentation

2008-06-06T11:25:00.005-04:00

Hi everyone,

Here's the the presentation Insum made at the first APEX SIG.

During the presentation, we made a complete application and we showed a finished version.
This is the final version of the application called "Collection de films".

Open Ora*Gec 2008 (4-5th June)

2008-06-06T09:45:00.012-04:00

Hi everyone,

During the last 2 days, people meet in Montreal for the Open Ora*Gec 2008. Of course, networking and discussing about Oracle technologies were the main reasons the be there.

It was good to see the interest for Oracle Application Express, again.

Our job at Open Oragec 2008 was to promote APEX as an option in web development and not only for small internal applications.

Insum was a gold sponsor (commanditaire Or) for this event.

Francis Mignault and Michel St-Amour from Insum made a presentation called "APEX - Push back the limits" (APEX - Repousser les limites).

There was also a presentation by Serge Tremblay from Oracle about APEX (same presentation that David Peake did) part1 and part2.

By the look at Francis' face, we can see how happy this man is working with APEX. ;)

Francis is getting ready for his presentation.

It was a good opportunity to get people to learn about the possibilities of Oracle Application Express.

More pictures here !

APEX SIG in pictures

2008-05-28T09:36:00.021-04:00

Pictures taken at the first APEX SIG in Montreal and Quebec city.

François Prévost, president of the ORA*GEC

David Peake presenting Apex and the new functionnalities from the latest version (3.1).

A lot of people assisted to the presentations.

Round table (Quebec city) :
Daniel Ste-Croix, Momentum technologies
Jean Lemieux, Ministère de l'Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport
Éliane Noël, Fonds de recherche du Québec
Michel Ganache, Momentum technologies

Round table (Montreal) :
Michelle Skamene, MUHC
Michel St-Amour, Insum
Nathalie Godechot, Bell Helicopter

Francis Mignault showing how easy it is to make a complete application with Application Express.
(Collection de films)

Louis-Guillaume Carrier-Bédard (me) helping Francis with his presentation.

Daniel Ste-Croix, Momentum technologies
Bruno Cloutier, Momentum technologies

Luc Demanche
Michel St-Amour, Insum
Francis Mignault, Insum
Patrick Bonneville, Insum

Thanks to everyone for making this event a success!!

Security notice for file download

2008-05-23T14:07:00.002-04:00

A few days ago, I added a download link in a page that calls a file download procedure within an URL. It quickly came to my mind that there was a security issue with this method. Indeed, nothing prevented me from downloading a file even if I wasn't logged into my APEX application.

I thought that the solution would be to add security in the procedure itself so it would check an application item value (userid) with the v() function. Unfortunately, this function cannot read apex items when it's being executed in a procedure called from an URL.

With some quick research, I found a solution on Denes Kubicek demo website. The solution is to call, with an URL, an on-demand application process which runs the file download procedure. This way, you absolutely have to be logged into the application to use the procedure since you need a valid session id in this URL.

You can find a document on Denes Kubicek demo website named "application_process - download.pdf". It explains step by step how to apply the secure method :

http://htmldb.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=31517:15

Reminder: Don't forget to revoke the execute privilege on the download procedure to apex_public_user if you granted it previously.

Eric.

Qu'est-ce que APEX ?

2008-05-20T21:11:00.002-04:00

Voici un petit viewlet qui explique ce qu'est APEX.

C'est une bonne introduction.

A faire circuler

--------------

What is APEX ?

Watch this viewlet to get introduced to APEX.

Found this reading Joel Kallman blog.

Francis.

Montreal APEX SIG

2008-05-19T18:55:00.007-04:00

Last wednesday and thursday (may 14 and 15 2008) we started an APEX user group in Montreal and in Quebec.

This new SIG is part of the Ora*gec (Oracle user group of the East Canada).

It was a success !

There was about 100 people in Quebec city and 100 people in Montreal.

This first meeting was half a day and we had Mr David Peake , the APEX product manager, as our special guest.

He talked about what APEX is all about, showed us the new features of 3.1 and told us about some features that will be available in future releases.

One thing is for sure is that the conversion from forms to APEX is something that a lot of people are waiting for.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank David Peake for taking the time to come over in Montreal and Quebec.

After that, we had a round table with some APEX users and finally, I did a presentation on APEX development methodology. Actually, I did a development of a small application starting from the analysis, the data model, the generation of the application, the improvement of this application and finally the move to production.

I can't wait for the next SIG meeting.

I will post some pictures soon. Stay tuned.

Francis.

New posts in english

2008-04-11T11:40:00.002-04:00

OK, from now on, I will post in english.

This will , I hope, open up the audience of my blog since usually most french speaking people can read english also :) (Désolé mais c'est la vie)

So , excuse my english and please be indulgent. I will try to run the spell check as often as possible...

This blog is mostly about Oracle Application Express and our experience here at Insum with the product.

Francis.

APEX 3.1

2008-03-03T18:59:00.003-05:00

Bonne nouvelle, la version de APEX 3.1 est maintenant officiellement en production et disponible pour tous.

Voir l'application de démonstration pour essayer les nouvelles fonctionnalités : Demo APEX 3.1

Francis.

Bonne Année 2008

2008-01-03T10:16:00.000-05:00

Bonne année 2008 à tous.

Que cette année soit remplie de projets APEX !!!

En passant, voici un petit truc pour traduire les messages internes d'APEX :
http://apex-notes.blogspot.com/2007/12/translating-internal-messages-used-by.html

Oracle Openworld - Dell Keynote

2007-11-26T09:34:00.001-05:00

Voici des liens qui pointe sur les vidéos du Keynote de Michael Dell lors du Oracle Open World 2007.

Video promotionnelle lors de l'ouverture du Keynote de DELL

Video de l'ouverture du Keynote de Dell - Suite (genre 24)

Video a propos des Générations

Video de la VM de Oracle en fonction sur les serveurs de DELL

Pour en avoir plus encore, voir le VLOG de dell : http://uk.youtube.com/user/DellVlog

Francis.

Oracle Openworld 2007 - Jour 5

2007-11-15T12:16:00.000-05:00

Dernier jour de conférence a OOW 2007

Je suis allé au plus gros party jamais vu. 43 000 personnes, Billy Joel et Lenny Kravitz en simultané sur 2 scènes différentes, de la bière et de la bouffe en quantité industrielle .

Simplement incroyable.

L'évènement a eu lieu au Cow Palace de San Francisco et j'ai assisté principalement au show de Billy Joel même si entre deux détours pour faire pleurer le colosse, je me suis aventuré dans la salle de Lenny. C'était drole de voir les indications dans les couloirs. On pouvait choisir entre Billy ou Lenny.

La journée a aussi été bien remplie. Le keynote de Larry était plus ou moins intéressant même que celui de DELL a été bien. (voir keynotes de wednesday).

Après , j'ai vu une présentation de Carl Backstrom sur les nouveautés dans Oracle Apex 3.1. Beaucoup de nouveaux ajouts avec AJAX pour pouvoir y intégrer de nouvelles fonctionalités et en faciliter l'utilisation. Et naturellement, le nouveau report layout avec les widget de tri et de filtre.

Ensuite, en fin de journée, une conférence concernant le Hacking de Oracle Apex donné par Anton Nielsen. Plusieurs petits points a vérifier sur la sécurité et sur le session state protection. Ce fut rassurant de voir que les gens de l'équipe APEX chez Oracle étaient présent pour y porter une attention particulière.

Donc, aujourd'hui dernier jour de conférence.

Francis.

Oracle OpenWorld - jour 4

2007-11-14T12:21:00.000-05:00

Hier fut une journée bien remplie.

J'ai assisté a deux conférences de Tom Kyte. Ce fut les meilleures conférences a date. Vraiment il a le tour d'expliquer les choses.

La première conférence était une conférence non technique sur "How do you know what you know". Simplement des explications sur comment être plus créatif et ne pas se laisser décourager ou influencer par de mauvaises assomptions. Vraiment bien comme présentation.

Un bon changement du technique habituel.

L'autre conférence de Tom Kyte était à propos des nouvelles fonctionalités de 11g , (Top 11).
Voici un résumé :

Encrypt Tablespaces
Cache more stuff
Standbyphysical
Real Application testing
Smaller data pump
Virtual column
Partitioning composite partition
Pivot
Flashback Data Archive
Finer grained dependency tracking
OLTP table compression

Il a aussi mentionné la conversion de SQL Curseur a DBMS_SQL et l'inverse également (DBMS_SQL.TO_NUMBER_CURSOR et DBMS_SQL.TO_REFCURSOR ).

Cette nouvelle fonctionalité sera très utile dans Oracle Application Express (APEX). (voir Oracle Magazine pour plus de détails).

Ce soir, c'est la grosse soirée "Appreciation Event" avec Billy Joel et Lenny Kravitz. J'ai bien hate.

Francis.

Oracle OPENWORLD 2007 - jour 3

2007-11-13T16:44:00.000-05:00

Jour 3 ,

ouf, je commence a être épuisé ! Il y a tellement à voir et à faire.

Hier (lundi), nous avons eu plusieurs conférences intéressantes et moins intéressantes.

Une conférence axé plus du côté expérience usager, fut très intéressante. Il s'agit d'une banque de washington (wamu). Ils utilisent APEX beaucoup et ils ont trouvé les mêmes avantages que nous. C'est agréable de voir que plus les gens utilisent APEX plus les gens en veulent.

Mais ce que j'ai le plus apprécié , ce fut de rencontrer les gens qui ont un intérêt avec APEX en soirée dans un cadre plus informel.

Nous avons eu un 5 a 7 suivi d'un souper. Ce fut agréable de pouvoir discuter directement avec les gens que l'on rencontre habituellement virtuellement.

Il y a plein de photos et de liens sur les sites des autres APEXIONADOs :

Dimitri : http://dgielis.blogspot.com/
John : http://jes.blogs.shellprompt.net/
Carl : http://carlback.blogspot.com/

Bonne lecture.

Demain, le keynote de Larry ! J'ai bien hâte de voir ça.

Francis

Oracle OpenWorld 2007 - Jour 2

2007-11-12T10:56:00.000-05:00

La journée de Lundi fut très occupée.

Plusieurs conférences concernant APEX dont une table ronde et une bonne conférence concernant le "Debugging" avec Oracle Application Express donné par John Scott (voir son blog ici : http://jes.blogs.shellprompt.net/ ).

J'y ai retenu trois choses :

1- on peut utiliser wwv_flow.debug('message') pour ajouter des messages dans les pages de debug de APEX (lorsque l'on roule l'application en mode DEBUG).

2- on peut utiliser SQL Developer en mode debug sur des fonctions ou packages stockés via une application APEX avec le package DBMS_DEBUG_JDWP.

3- avec APEX 3.0 , on peut utiliser le dictionnaire de APEX pour y faire des statistiques concernant les temps d'acces moyens , maximum et minimum des pages de nos applications.

Je vais tenter de trouver les détails de ces trois points et je les metterai dans ce blog a mon retour .

Par la suite, il y a eu Sunday Night Live , un genre de parodie de Saturday Night Live avec des comédiens de SNL et une présentation de Larry sur les 30 ans de Oracle. A voir : http://www.oracle.com/openworld/2007/keynotes.html

Bon, aujourd'hui c'est le début de Oracle Develop. Je vais aller faire un tour au Hilton et aussi c'est l'ouverture des Kiosques de l'exposition.

Beaucoup de marche en vue :)

Et en soirée, un 5 a 7 avec les gens APEX suivi d'une soiré OTN.

A plus.

Francis.

Oracle OPENWORLD 2007 - Jour 1

2007-11-11T11:57:00.000-05:00

Enfin a San Francisco pour l'Oracle Openworld 2007.

Le voyage s'est bien passé et l'arrivée aussi.
Je suis a l'hotel Warwick Regis sur la rue Geary. C'est a 10 minutes a pieds environ du Moscone Center.

Ce qui est spécial , c'est de voir toutes ces affiches Oracle rouges partout dans la ville.

J'ai hâte que les conférences commencent afin de rencontrer les gens. La ville ressemble beaucoup a Montréal mais avec un peu plus de gens :)

L'enregistrement a l'Openworld a été un peu longue car il faut se promener un peu partout afin de s'enregistrer correctement et ramasser toutes les choses que l'on nous donne.

J'ai refait un tour de mon horaire et aujourd'hui dimanche , ca devrait être une bonne journée APEX.

A suivre ...

Francis.

APEX BUG FIXED : ORA-20001: Sync error: WWV_FLOW_PAGE_PLUGS.PLUG_HEADER ORA-22922: nonexistent LOB value

2007-10-05T15:57:00.000-04:00

Bonne nouvelle,

Lors de la traduction (publish) dans APEX 3.0.1 , j'avais toujours une erreur du genre :
ORA-20001: Sync error: WWV_FLOW_PAGE_PLUGS.PLUG_HEADER ORA-22922: nonexistent LOB value

Avec l'aide de l'équipe de APEX (Joel Kallman) nous avons fait un bug fix.

Si vous avez cette erreur, il s'agit d'un bug de base de donnée mais l'équipe Oracle APEX ont modifié le code pour ne plus avoir cette erreur.

Un bug fix est maintenant disponible sur Metalink. Bug # 6456920

#------------------------------------------------------------
# Patchset Exception : Bug 6456920 ORA-22922 WHEN PUBLISHING A
# TRANSLATED APPLICATION
# -------------------------------------------------------------
#
# DATE : September 28, 2007
# -----------------------
# Platform Patch for : Generic - Platform independent
# This fix be applied to Oracle Application Express Product Version
# : 3.0.1.00.07 or 3.0.1.00.08
# Product Patched : Oracle Application Express
#
# Bugs Fixed by this patch:
# -------------------------
# This patch fixes bug 6456920

Insum a l'Oracle Open World 2007

2007-10-04T10:16:00.000-04:00

C'est fait, le voyage est réservé pour OOW 2007 !

Une excellente occasion d'aller rencontrer les gens de l'équipe Oracle APEX et de voir ce qui s'en vient avec les prochaines versions.

A suivre ...

APEX 4.0

2007-09-24T09:09:00.000-04:00

Il est intéressant de voir ce que la version 4.0 nous réserve.

Pour avoir un apperçu, voir le blog de Dietmar et de Carl Backstrom : http://daust.blogspot.com/2007/09/apex-roundtable-talk-with-mike-hichwa.html

A l'aide de cette nouvelle interface, il sera possible d'effectuer des filtres et des tris dynamiquement sur les rapports APEX. Et ce par l'usager et sans programmation.

A voir absolument.

APEX podcast

2007-07-13T09:13:00.000-04:00

Ce matin par un pur hasard, j'ai trouvé un podcast qui parle de APEX sur le Blog de Lewis Cunningham.

Il est aussi possible d'y avoir accès via le Blog de Dimitri.

Il est aussi question de questions à propos de APEX pour ceux qui se posent des questions existantielles à propos du produit.

Bonne écoute :)

Francis.

APEX 3.0.1

2007-06-29T09:17:00.000-04:00

Bonne nouvelle !

Apex 3.0.1 est maintenant disponible : http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/application_express/index.html

De ce que j'ai compris, cette version sera la version installée avec Oracle 11g.

Pour plus de détails : http://otn.oracle.com/apex

APEXposed - La suite

2007-06-22T09:26:00.000-04:00

Bonjour,

De retour de la conférence ODTUG de Daytona Beach. J'ai suivi la formation/conférence APEX avancée. Ce fut intéressant de rencontrer les personnes qui ont codés HTMLDB (APEX).

Malgré que chez Insum nous faisons du APEX depuis maintenant plus de 3 ans, j'ai quand même appris quelques nouvelles notions.

Je dois dire que ce que j'ai trouvé le plus intéressant ce sont les nouveautés qui seront dans les versions 3.0.1 et 3.1.

Le fait de pouvoir gérer les applications directement à partir de SQL Developper va surement simplifier la gestion des mises en test et mises en production.

Dans 3.1 , des ajouts de filtres et de recherche au niveau des colonnes de rapports feront aussi certainement la joie de nos utilisateurs !

Donc en somme, un deux jours intéressant et éducatif. Maintenant, il ne nous reste plus qu'a attendre ces nouvelles versions (3.0.1 devrait sortir en théorie le 22 juin).

Si vous voulez plus d'informations a propos de la conférence, vous pouvez toujouts consulter le blog de Dimitri Geilis.

ODTUG - APEX 2007

2007-06-13T21:37:00.000-04:00

Bonne nouvelle, Je vais a Daytona Beach afin d'assister a la conférence APEX 2007 le 18 et 19 juin prochain.

Il s'agit de deux journées conférences sur Oracle Application Express dans le cadre du groupe d'usager ODTUG.

Je vous tiens au courant ! Ca promet ...

APEX 3.0 officiellement production

2007-03-26T11:30:00.000-04:00

Hey oui, une nouvelle version d'Oracle application express est maintenant disponible.

Voir l'annonce : http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070326/sfm056.html?.v=86

Il s'agit d'une version majeure (3.0) avec des nouveautés intéressantes tel que la possibilité de faire des graphes en flash, l'impression de PDF et bien plus.

Il est possible d'avoir plus d'information sur OTN également : http://otn.oracle.com/apex

Apex sur Oracle 11G

2007-03-09T09:35:00.000-05:00

Hey oui, ce n'est pas une erreur de syntaxe, c'est bien écrit 11G

Voir le lien suivant pour un résumé de ce qu'Oracle prévoit mettre dans sa prochaine version de base de données : http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3639621

Ceci devrait rassurer les gens en démontrant que Oracle Application Express ne sera pas un webdb ...

APEX Export Excel - Limiter les colonnes

2006-12-29T11:49:00.000-05:00

Voici un petit truc que j'ai trouvé sur le blogue de Sergio Leunissen qui permet de controler les colonnes qui seront affichés dans l'export Excel :

http://www.orablogs.com/sergio/archives/001873.html

L'année APEX 2006

2006-12-29T11:29:00.000-05:00

En effet, 2006 tire a sa fin ... (snif).

On peut dire que ce fut toute une année pour APEX (HTMLDB) !

De nouvelles versions (2.2) et un nouveau nom. Aussi mais surtout , beaucoup de nouveaux utilisateurs (voir : http://inside-apex.blogspot.com/2006/12/spread-of-apex.html).

Sur cette note, je vous souhaite une bonne année 2007 et pleins de nouveaux projets avec APEX .

Oracle Linux (Redhat) a bon prix

2006-11-19T10:24:00.000-05:00

Saviez-vous que Oracle propose maintenant un support pour Linux Redhat via metalink ?

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/linux/index.html

Il s'agit d'une excellente nouvelle. Non seulement le prix est de loin meilleur que celui de redhat ES (99$ US vs 350$ US), mais le support est offert par Oracle. Donc fini les problèmes de relance vers Redhat et vice-versa.

Si on ajoute la base de données 10g Express (gratuite et incluant Application Express) , on peut alors faire plein de choses intéressantes. Par exemple, convertir des applications Microsoft Access en Oracle. Ou encore, pourquoi ne pas développer les petites applications web que nous avons toujours besoin ? Tel que feuilles de temps, factures ou encore suivi des tâches.

Je crois qu'enfin Oracle prends les bonnes décisions. Le problème a toujours été le prix trop élevé et l'accessibilité aux PME et individus. Maintenant on peu s'offrir Oracle pour créer de petites applications qui un jour deviendrons grandes sans avoir a souffrir du syndrôme open source.

Insum Solutions APEX Blog

2006-11-13T20:30:00.000-05:00

Bonjour,

Bienvenue dans mon blog principalement axé sur Oracle Application Express (Alias HTMLDB).

Insum Solutions inc est une entreprise de Montréal se spécialisant dans le développement d'application avec Oracle application express (APEX).

Nous travaillons avec cet outil depuis sa sortie en 2004 (V 1.5).

Croyez moi, je travaille avec Oracle depuis maintenant plus de 20 ans et APEX est le produit qui mérite beaucoup d'attention depuis la sortie de Oracle forms 1.6.

Facile a utiliser et en plus gratuit, ce nouvel outil peut facilement remplacer du développement avec Java ou encore avec Web Forms a cause de son prix (Gratuit avec Oracle de base !!).

Non, ce n'est pas un autre Webdb. Au contraire, les compagnies devraient y jeter un coup d'oeil car on peut enfin générer du vrai web sans avoir à apprendre de nouveaux langages. Tout se fait via PL/SQL et la rapidité est au rendez-vous.

Pour plus d'informations voir : http://otn.oracle.com/apex

A venir, des trucs et astuces concernant APEX.