Drag and Drop data from EXCEL into APEX

Often users you want to edit data inside EXCEL spreadsheet and then upload the data into some application. Often users download data into EXCEL and manipulate the data local.

We got a request from a customer who wanted to download data into EXCEL and maintain the data local and then the user wanted to update the data into the database again. Reason for this requirement was that inside EXCEL he wanted to cut and past columns of data into the spreadsheet from other spreadsheets.

We made an application which the customer could do the following:

• Download data to EXCEL and maintain data local
  


• Drag and Drop data direct into APEX application


• Cut & Paste data direct into APEX application


• Edit data before submit of data into database


• Highlite rows which was uploaded


• Validate data


• Upload lots of data (many MB of data)
  
  

We think this feature is cool and makes it very easy to manipulate data local with the features EXCEL can offer. We made a "Draqg And Drop" region inside the APEX page where the data i past and dragged. Thanks to Stephen & Sara which made this possible.

Requirements for the demo application to work is that you must drag and drop 5 columns from excel since the application require 5 columns and column 4 must be number.

you can play the video here

you can try the demo application here

Setup BI dashboard in APEX

I have been looking around for some good Business Intelligence Dashboard templates to be used together with APEX. What our customer wanted was a dashboard which was easy to navigate and functional to use.

We wanted to put in some web 2.0 functionality such as drag and drop for placing portles in the position the user wanted and and lots more Jquery stuff such as tabs, modal popup windows, nice help window, date picker, resize of menu navigator, hide/show portlets. The layout is automaticly saved in the database.

The web 2.0 features is made by using Jquery to get a slick and fast refresh of the page.

What we ended up with was a APEX theme which you can have a look at

http://www.apex-home.com/pls/apex/f?p=56502:300:2432006777088735::::NEWSID:200

Thanks to Stephen Blair at apex-themes which made a very good job putting this together.

Together with Oracle Warehousebuilder, BI Publisher, APEX Interactive reporting, and Anycharting it should be possible to make functional and good solutions without high starting cost.

regards
Jon

Problem after resetting ADMIN password after running apxchpwd.sql

I ran into problem when i forgot my password for ADMIN user in APEX. I logged in as sys on database and executed apxchpwd.sql. All went fine no errors. The trouble started when i was trying to login to apex_admin page (http://nbi2crm3.colorline.com:7777/pls/apex/apex_admin).

I got error Application access restricted to internal workspace users. I was also not able to login to my workspace since when i tried to login i was redirected to change password page and when i supplied the old and new password APEX claimed that old password was wrong all the time.

Well i was stucked and didn't get login either to APEX admin or my workspace. Then i
saw a notice on APEX forum and this helped my out of the problem. The answer to the problem which helped me out was the following:

login to database as sys

alter session set current_schema = APEX_030200;

update wwv_flow_fnd_user
set change_password_on_first_use ='N'
where lower(user_name) = 'admin'
/
commit
/

This helped me out of the problem, now i was able to login to apex_admin and also to login to my workspaces.

Hope this also could help other if they get problem after running apxchpwd.sql.

BI Publiser with APEX examples here

Using Oracle BI Publisher together with APEX is a strong combination. I have made a demo page which show some examples reports. You can find the demo page here

How to setup slideshow on your APEX page

If you are looking for slideshow setup on your APEX page which works well i Firefox and IE (version 6 and 7) and is very easy to install then maybe you should look at Jon Raasch at http://jonraasch.com/blog/a-simple-jquery-slideshow.
It takes you just minuts to setup this software. I was first using JQuery PikaChoose

on my page but i run into trouble when using older jquery.js than jquery-1.2.6. I had to use the older version of jquery.js because of pulldown menus on my page ,the older version and PikaChoose slideshow did not function well in IE6, then i found Jon Raasch slideshow and this worked well with the older jquery.js library. You can have a look at how it works here.

In the HTML Header section of your page insert the following javascript and CSS setup:

Create a "HTML region" in the position on the page where you want the slideshow should be displayed and insert the HTML code below in the source column:

In the code above i have uploaded 3 images as workspace images into the database and used these in the slide show. You can adjust the interval between changing the images in the setInterval function.

Thats it, simple and easy.

Yet another blog about APEX and Oracle...

Welcome to my Oracle blog. The APEX community in Norway is not very big at the moment. There is some companies which make some customer solutions but if you go and talk with Oracle Norway and ask about Application Express then most of them don't know what you are talking about. This is pitty since APEX is a great development plattform for making modern web applications fast and secure.

I feel we have to do something about this. Based on our pervious experience with APEX in other projects started back in 2006 we have gone from succes to succes with our APEX projects implementations. When we decided to started our new Oracle company in 2009 we also decided to promote APEX in Norway and we hope we can be able to make a living on APEX technology in the future. To get apex-home.com from development and deployed into production is the first step to go.

Welcome to my blog.

Hi !

Welcome to my Blog This blog was original created back in 2006, and what happen between 2006 and 2009?, good question.. i have been busy reading all the good APEX blogs out there i guess