A customer recently asked how APEX could track who clicked “download” from an Interactive Grid. After some quick searching of the logs, I realized that APEX simply does not record this type of activity, aside from a simple page view type of “AJAX” entry. This was not specific enough, and of course, led to the next question - can we prevent users from downloading data from a grid entirely? I knew that any Javascript-based solution would fall short of their security requirements, since it is trivial to reconstruct the URL pattern required to initiate a download, even if the Javascript had removed the option from the menu. Thus, I had to consider a PL/SQL-based approach - one that could not be bypassed by a malicious end user. To solve this problem, I turned to APEX’s Initialization PL/SQL Code parameter. Any PL/SQL code entered in this region will be executed before any other APEX-related process. Thus, it is literally the first place that a developer can interact with an APEX p
Mostly Oracle APEX. Mostly.