Posts

Showing posts from January, 2016

APEX Dashboard Competition for English Locale

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The other day Tobias announced a new competition where you can win Apple products, and what you need to do is build a dashboard in Oracle Application Express using some supplied data. Your are invited to the #orclapex Dashboard Competition: https://t.co/u47QyBRtVN #letswreckthistogether pic.twitter.com/G2fLM9kzw1 — Tobias Arnhold (@tobias_arnhold) January 17, 2016 I'm about to go on a little trip so I thought I'd load up this data into my local VM so that if I had some down time, I could have a play around with it (not yet sure if I'll enter!). The only problem was, I started receiving errors during the data import, as per: As from that screenshot, you will see the number is using a decimal point as a comma (as opposed to what I am used to, and what the session is expecting, a period). To be honest, I didn't even realise different locale's used different decimal marks - but after turning to Wikipedia, I see there are a large number of nations tha

Upgrading APEX on XE without the patch sets

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To get APEX patch sets requires a paid support account to get access to the patch sets for minor updates - so upgrading APEX on our XE database installations can be challenging for those of us without a paid support account. So effectively, what you need to do is remove APEX, and re-install from scratch. APEX also comes with a Java program to perform backups, where you can for example export invididual workspaces, export all workspaces, export invidual applications, export applications by workspace id, or export all applications. I grabbed the idea from this apexbackup project on GitHub:  https://github.com/OraOpenSource/apexbackup . Basically, you need to set your CLASSPATH to point to: The Oracle Java database driver - typically $ORACLE_HOME/lib/ojdbc5.jar or $ORACLE_HOME/jdbc/lib/ojdbc5.jar The utilities folder in the APEX installation files After that has been set,  you can run the program. e.g:  export CLASSPATH=$ORACLE_HOME/jdbc/lib/ojdbc5.jar:$ORACLE_HOME/apex/util

APEX Instance Admin Preferences Cheat Sheet

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APEX comes with an API - APEX_INSTANCE_ADMIN - where you can both get and set instance preferences. There is a list of available properties on the documentation, however I found that not all preferences were documented there. For example, in Feature Configuration, there are some preferences surrounding packaged applications: Looking at the documentation,  https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E59726_01/doc.50/e39149/apex_instance.htm#CHDFEICJ , you may find it difficult locating these. Then, there other properties in there that I don't think are relevant any more (..but not an expert on the subject, so may be wrong). Lets take the example of  PASSWORD_HISTORY_DAYS  - this states " Defines the maximum number of days a developer or administrator account password may be used before the account expires. The default value is 45 days. ". We can locate the property it's talking about under Security - Authentication Control - Development Environment Settings.