Scott Spendolini's Blog

If you've been using APEX long enough, you've probably used a PL/SQL Region to render some sort of HTML that the APEX built-in components simply can't handle. Perhaps a complex chart or region that has a lot of custom content and/or layout. While best practices may be to use an APEX component, or if not, build a plugin, we all know that sometimes reality doesn't give us that kind of time or flexibility. While the PL/SQL Region is quite powerful, it still lacks a key feature: the ability to be refreshed by a Dynamic Action. This is true even in APEX 5. Fortunately, there's a simple workaround that only requires a small change to your code: change your procedure to a function and call it from a Classic Report region. In changing your procedure to a function, you'll likely only need to make one type of change: converting and htp.prn calls to instead populate and return a variable at the end of the function. Most, if not all of the rest of the code can rem...

On Twitter today, Jeff Smith tweeted about a new SQL Developer cheat sheet that he created with a site called cheatography.com . Not to be outdone, I created a cheat sheet for the APEX 5 Keyboard Shortcuts . Not only can you view it online, but you can also download a PDF version of it. Check it out and let me know if there's anything that you'd like to see added.

In migrating SERT from 4.2 to 5.0, there's a number of challenges that I'm facing. This has to do with the fact that I am also migrating a custom theme to the Universal Theme, as almost 100% of the application just worked if I chose to leave it alone. I didn't. More on that journey in a longer post later. In any case, some of the IR filters that I have on by default can get a bit... ugly. Even in the Universal Theme: In APEX 4.2, you could click on the little arrow, and it would collapse the region entirely, leaving only a small trace that there's a filter. That's no longer the case: So what to do... Enter CSS & the Universal Theme. Simply edit the page and add the following to the Inline CSS region (or add the CSS to the Theme Roller if you want this change to impact all IRs): .a-IRR-reportSummary-item { display: none; } This will cause most of the region to simply not display at all - until you click on the small triangle icon, which will...