Chris Date Seminar

Chris Date is giving a 2 day seminar called SQL and Relational Theory - How to Write Accurate SQL Code in Edinburgh, 13th-14th May 2010. I really wish I could go to it myself. I attended one of his seminars back in about 1997 and it was both riveting and highly educational.

Apex 4.0 - no more dummy branches required

How many times do you see this error page while building an Apex page?

ERR-1777: Page 1 provided no page to branch to.
Please report this error to your application administrator.

To avoid that, I have a habit of creating an unconditional branch back to the same page in every page I build, with a sequence number higher than all the conditional branches. If I then add new conditional branches I have to ensure that I change the default sequence to a lower value.

A long time ago (in 2007) in this OTN forum thread I asked:

"I don't understand why we have to create these unconditional branches at all - why can't the default behaviour be to branch back to the same page if no other branch is taken? When is the "no page to branch to" error ever useful?!"

In Apex 4.0, this annoyance finally disappears:

"When no branches have been defined then branch page back to itself rather than showing an error."

Sometimes the little things make all the difference!

Trying Out Apex 4.0 Dynamic Actions

In my spare moments I am currently familiarising myself with the Apex 4.0 Early Adopter edition. One of the many exciting new features is Dynamic Actions. These allow you to add functionality to your pages that would previously have required writing Javascript, AJAX calls and On Demand PL/SQL processes, but can now be done declaratively.

The following very simple example shows 3 uses:
1) Enabling/disabling one field according to the value of another
2) Calculating and displaying a value when items are updated
3) Retrieving information from the database when an item is changed.

There is little documentation about Dynamic Actions yet, so I'm not sure I have always taken the best approach.

My example is a "Create Employee" page that inserts a row into the familiar EMP table:

I have created a Dynamic Action that makes the Commission item enabled only when the selected job is one of 'MANAGER' or 'SALESMAN'.

MANAGER selected:

CLERK selected:

These are "simple" actions, I merely had to specify which item values trigger the action like this:

... and then specify the item to be enabled/disabled.

Another dynamic action computes the "Total Package" as SAL+COMM when either of these two items are updated:

I did this using a Javascript fragment rather than PL/SQL, to avoid an unnecessary AJAX trip to the database:

(OK so I did have to write some Javascript! But not much.)

A third dynamic action fires when a manager is selected; this looks up the selected employee and gets his/her job title and department name and dislays them in 2 page items:

This last action isn't as efficient as I'd like because it results in 2 AJAX calls: one to get the job and one to get the department name. This could be a case of me just not knowing the right way to do it in one hit. I used 2 "true actions" that use SQL to set the value of an item. The first has this SQL:

select job from emp where empno = :p2_mgr

and the second:

select dname
from dept join emp using (deptno)
where empno = :p2_mgr