Scott Spendolini's Blog

What? There's no way to put a Branch on Page 0 of an ApEx application! Or is there... Technically, no - page 0 does not support branches. But how many times do you wish it did? This scenario recently came up: I wanted to put a "Search" box on every page in my application, so no matter where a user is, they can search the site. Currently, it has 10 or so pages, but this will grow to closer to 50 by production. So, thought #1 was to put an text item on Page 0, call it search, and then ensure that each and every page had some sort of Branch to run the search. Not so fun, as this was a tedious task, even for just 10 pages. And each time a new page was added to the application - by myself or anyone else - the search branch would have to be added to the page. Clearly not a scalable solution. With a little bit of help from Raj from the ApEx team, I came up with this solution: Create Page 0, if you haven't already On page 0, create an item of type "Text Field (...

As noted on Boing Boing , Yahoo! just released its UI Library , an open-source set of AJAX user interface components that developers can use in their sites for free! From Trees to Sliders, some of these components look quite slick! The real challenge here is not getting them to work with Oracle ApEx, but rather finding practical applications for them. So often I see sites where AJAX is used for the sake of using AJAX, and the result is just a mess. What intriques me are the reasons behind this. As I've been told many times, there is no such thing as a free anyyhing - it's just a question of when and how you pay. Perhaps Yahoo is trying to steer developers to its services (Maps, Calendar, Mail, etc.) in a pre-emptive strike against Google? Should be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with using DIVs instead of TABLEs for creating Region Templates in Oracle Application Express. DIVs seem to have a lot less “moving parts” – or places where the code can become corrupted. Troubleshooting a missing <TD> tag is never a fun exercise, and by using DIVs, you can largely avoid that. However, DIVs tend to have issues with cross-browser development. What looks great on Firefox doesn’t even render on MSIE. That alone can be a challenge to troubleshoot, Having said all of this, I was able to take this Region Template: <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" id="#REGION_ID#"> <tr> <td> <table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" width="100%"> <tr> <td bgcolor="#666666"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" bgcolor=...