Scott Spendolini's Blog

Based on the success of our March/April public training in Ashburn, VA, I'm happy to announce that we're going to do it again this July 21st through 25th. Like last time, there will be two sessions - a 3-day Intro to APEX 3.1 class and a 2-day Intermediate APEX 3.1 class. Both sessions filled up completely last time, so don't wait until the last minute! More details about each class and a registration page can be found on the Sumner Technologies, LLC web site .

The following is a re-post of the "Cloning your Corporate UI with HTML DB" series that I blogged about back in 2005 on the now-defunct Orablogs site. Most of the content and advise is still the same today, and has been reposted here exactly as it was on the old site. July 12, 2005 What's the best way to ensure that you have more work to do? Use a statement like "That about wraps up this series" in your "final" posting in a series! As Earl Lewis pointed out , things are not 100% correct when using MSIE. Now, there's a very simple cut-and-dry solution to this problem: Don't use MSIE. However, for those who have not yet made the switch to Firefox yet (which, according to traffic on HTML DB Studio is still about 80% of you), you will also see this error. Thus, it is critical that you test your site in both - if not more - browsers. This is something which I simply forgot to do. It's as simple as this: the same HTML can and often wil...

The following is a re-post of the "Cloning your Corporate UI with HTML DB" series that I blogged about back in 2005 on the now-defunct Orablogs site. Most of the content and advise is still the same today, and has been reposted here exactly as it was on the old site. July 8, 2005 Finally! I just deployed the new look for both Oracle HTML DB Studio & Oracle HTML DB References . (I'll get to Best Practices PL/SQL a bit later today - have to do some customer calls first) I basically gave up on the DHTML menus - it was taking too much time and overall, I think it just didn't add enough value for me to keep pulling my hair out over. The base OTN Menus are there - clicking on them brings you to the appropriate page in OTN - where the menus work just fine... I did get a little over ambitious, and decided to give the splash page of both Studio & References a make-over. Check them out: Both of them now "look & feel" like the rest of OTN & o...

The following is a re-post of the "Cloning your Corporate UI with HTML DB" series that I blogged about back in 2005 on the now-defunct Orablogs site. Most of the content and advise is still the same today, and has been reposted here exactly as it was on the old site. June 14, 2005 In the last installment, the converted site looked pretty good, but the tabs were not quite working. The issue here was overlapping FORMs. If you look at the HTML source of the OTN Home Page, there's an HTML Form which processes the "Search" function. This form was overlapping with HTML DB's Form; thus generating an error when a tab was clicked - which essentially does an HTML POST via a JavaScript function. In HTML DB Templates, two commonly used tokens are #FORM_OPEN# and #FORM_CLOSE# . These tokens are used where you want to open & close the "functioning" portion of an HTML DB Page. When an HTML DB page is rendered, the #FORM_OPEN# & #FORM_CLOSE# tags are sub...

The following is a re-post of the "Cloning your Corporate UI with HTML DB" series that I blogged about back in 2005 on the now-defunct Orablogs site. Most of the content and advise is still the same today, and has been reposted here exactly as it was on the old site. June 10, 2005 Before I jump into the Page Header & Footer, I thought that I'd take a minute to detail how moved all of the images from www.oracle.com to htmldb.oracle.com. Using Firefox, I'm able to view a list of all images on a page by right-clicking the page and selecting View Page Info. Under the Media tab is a list of all images referenced on this page. I decided to use http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/oracle10g/index.html as a starting point. All in all, there were about 15 images which I saved, and then moved to htmldb.oracle.com. I FTP'ed all of these images to a new directory on htmldb.oracle.com, in order to keep them all organized in a single place. Next, I have to cha...

The following is a re-post of the "Cloning your Corporate UI with HTML DB" series that I blogged about back in 2005 on the now-defunct Orablogs site. Most of the content and advise is still the same today, and has been reposted here exactly as it was on the old site. June 8, 2005 Things look really good. The page rendered almost perfectly, it all mostly lines up, and there are only a couple of broken images. We're almost done, right? Wrong. There is still a lot of work to be done. Essentially, as it stands now, we have created a static Page Template that doesn't play well with the rest of HTML DB. Also, there are no navigational aids for HTML DB Studio left - they have been replaced by content from OTN. Which leads us to our next step - removing more OTN content. Removing OTN Content First of all, I don't need the content in the 3rd column at all on my pages (Resources For, Featured Downloads, Discussion Forums). However, I do want to retain that column and d...

The following is a re-post of the "Cloning your Corporate UI with HTML DB" series that I blogged about back in 2005 on the now-defunct Orablogs site. Most of the content and advise is still the same today, and has been reposted here exactly as it was on the old site. Enjoy! June 8, 2005 I've often been asked how to create custom Themes & Templates with Oracle HTML DB. The truth is that it’s one half Art, and one half Science. (Note: Percentages may vary based on what you consider “Art” and “Science”). And since the desired look and feel varies from site to site, there’s no easy way to document these steps. Thus, I am going to attempt to “blog” my way through it, using a real-world example. As you may know, the look & feel of oracle.com was recently updated as part of the re-launch of oracle.com, OTN, etc. I believe that this is now the 4th UI in 2 years for oracle.com. Three sites that I manage - Oracle HTML DB Studio, Oracle HTML DB References, and Best Pr...

APEX validations allow a server-side validation to occur for a number of different conditions - item not null, item is numeric/alphanumeric, regular expressions, etc. When a validation fails, you have four options to display the corresponding error message: Inline with Field Notification Message Both inline with field & Notification Message Separate Error Page With a simple template modification, you can create a fifth option, which is a variation of option #3 above. It will still display the message in the notification, but only highlight the label of the item in question. This allows for a couple of things: first, if you have a form with a number of items and a fixed width template, error messages inline with items will wreak havoc on the layout, pushing items off to the right and misalign your entire page. By only highlighting the label of the item in question, the user is aware of where the issue is, and can simply look in the notification region to understand what needs to...

It seems as if someone didn't pay the bills, and OraBlogs.com - where my first blog was started - has been taken over by a, well, let's just say a less savory site. The content of the new site is slightly NSFW; clicking on any of the links we can only assume is definitely NSFW. The real shame is that it seems as if all of the content from not only my old blog, but those of several others, is gone and unable to be recovered. A couple of weeks back, I did manage to save off my posts about Cloning your Corporate UI, and will eventually resurrect them and re-post it here. However, all of my other content is lost for good, it seems. :( In any case, you may want to change your bookmarks & links to not reference orablogs.com anymore.

More of a false alarm than anything else - it seems as if the two issues are resolved in APEX 3.0.1. Upgrading to 3.0.1 or the latest release - APEX 3.1 - should fix the two identified issues. For those running APEX 3.0, 2.2 or earlier, it looks like it's time to take a look at getting up to date!

As if April 15th doesn't bring enough joy to those of us in the US (Hint: it's tax day!), Oracle is scheduling its release of its next Critical Patch Update on the same day as most of us will be making a frantic late-day trip to the post office. From the bulletin on OTN: This Critical Patch Update contains 17 new security fixes for the Oracle Database including 2 for Oracle Application Express. Two of these vulnerabilities may be remotely exploited without authentication, i.e. may be exploited over a network without the need for a username and password. While somewhat vague, it does seem that there are a couple of APEX-related issues that will be addressed. We'll just have to wait and see what they are specifically...

If you're in Dublin next week, Oracle Ireland is hosting an APEX Developers Day at its offices in Clontarf. It seems as if the event is free of charge, but more information can be gained by e-mailing amanda.fay@oracle.com .