Tuesday 31 July 2007

Regular Expressions in Oracle 10g database

As I was on holiday in Toulouse (France), I'll have to skip a week or two of my OTN Forms forum posts. However, while cleaning up my browser bookmarks, I found some gems of the SQL and PL/SQL forum I thought I'd share. Last year, user "cd" wrote an excellent introduction on using regular expressions in the Oracle 10g database. You can find the series here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

If you haven't got a clue about what regular expressions are, make the effort of trying out the examples, you'll find they are very powerful and can make your programming life a lot easier. If you prefer your reading material to be portable, you could try the Oracle Regular Expressions Pocket Reference by Jonathan Gennick.

Sunday 15 July 2007

OTN forms forum, week 28

As I was either away from home, studying, or too busy at work, my summary for the last week is kind of limited, maybe quality makes up for quantity ;)

* Delete table for a user in when_button_press

The solution works fine of course, but I still feel one should ask why someone would have such a requirement.

* Need some help?

A fun read on a very specific business requirement. Try coming up with a solution yourself before scrolling down to see what others came up with! :)

* Do form menus respect hierarchical roles?

A Forms limitation you might have stumbled upon yourself: due to the view Forms uses to determine the roles for a user, it fails to see nested or hierarchical roles. The solution is quite simple however.

Sunday 8 July 2007

OTN forms forum, week 27

I kept an eye on the Oracle Forms forum on OTN last week, I'll probably get tired of it soon, but for what it's worth, here are some topics I found interesting. My personal wrap-up for week 27:

* How long is Oracle Forms/Developer Suite to be supported?

Should be reassuring for those who invest(ed) a lot of their time in the Forms technology, be it as a company or as a developer. If I got a euro for every time it's proclaimed dead, I could buy myself some new Oracle books. As stated, it's mostly the new trends in webdevelopment that toll the bell.

* François Degrelle's Forms look & feel project

While you're hanging on to Forms, a great way to upgrade your skills is integrating Java Beans and Pluggable Java Components. François Degrelle has been doing this for a while, it's worth your time checking out his blog.

* Bean to load image item from URL?

One simple example of the Forms & Java integration mentioned above.

* Any way to know the source table of a form at runtime?

I picked this one to point out the difference between where you query from (block_property QUERY_DATA_SOURCE_NAME) and where you write your data to (block property DML_DATA_TARGET_NAME). They don't have to be identical.

* Substitute for JInitiator

For those who think they're stuck to JInitiator to run forms on the web, this thread provides some links to installing the Sun JRE plugin as an alternative.

Coaching

The last few weeks I spent a significant portion of my time coaching junior developers, which I enjoy a lot. I'm learning learning people :-) You have to pay attention to how you help someone. Just giving or showing them the solution won't get them any further when they encounter a similar problem.
Most of the time, I'll show the relevant section of the help files (in case of Forms) or the Oracle docs, hoping they'll pick it up as a problem-solving strategy.
I also try to ask questions in a certain direction, so they can 'give birth' to a solution themselves. If my terminology strikes you as odd, it refers to the maieutic method of Socrates.

R.S. Wurmans's book (in the currently reading section to the right) also has some interesting ideas on giving instructions. It's not the most recent, but certainly still up-to-date, and plenty of food for thought. If you reckon the original book came out at the start of the 90's, that's an amazing feat.

Thursday 5 July 2007

Going flat on your face

It's been a while since I posted here, I've been too busy in the 'real' world searching/buying a house. We found a nice place and are probably moving by the end of summer.
There's a new 'story' on my technical blog, on PL/SQL AFTER triggers, you can read it here.