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.

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.

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.

Oracle ADF for Forms & PL/SQL Developers

As you can see, I added a page element to the right with the book(s) I'm currently reading. I bought Oracle JDeveloper 10g for Forms & PL/SQL Developers yesterday. Even though I'm still working on Forms projects, I think it's important to stay on top of the new technologies and get at least the basics of them down. Also on my wish list is the APEX book by Jon Scott and Scott Spendolini, it should be out next month, I can't wait.

I nearly finished my apex home accounting application, it just needs a report or two with some balance overviews. My next project will be a new website for our band. If I find the time, I'll also make the same projects with JDeveloper+ADF, could be interesting...

APEX and a list of Months

My colleague Dimitri will be glad to hear I started experimenting with APEX again. I have been doing my home accounting in Excel for years, and it seemed like a nice project to try and build in APEX. As I wanted the data structure to be a little different, I didn't just import the excel sheets, but designed a new data model and started from there. I might still import the excels to have the old data available in Oracle as well, even write a small ETL routine to convert to the new model. For now I'm just having fun learning a new way to make client interfaces.

One of the (mainly SQL) 'issues' I had was creating a select list with all the months of a year, in a meaningful and efficient way. I used a combination of date formatting and a row generator, you can read more about that here.

Are you the smartest?

I finished the last test of Oracle's "Are you the smartest?" contest yesterday, it was about SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), and it was hard...
For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about: AYTS is an annual contest organised by Oracle. It consists of attending four sessions of Sales Consultants presenting business solutions. This year's sessions were about BI Suite, JDeveloper & ADF, SOA Suite and Identity Management. I liked the BI and JDev sessions, the others were a case of "slow death by powerpoint" for me.

I liked the ease, transparancy and intuitive interface of the BI Suite. JDeveloper and ADF I had already worked with, and I'll admit it's an amazing and wide-ranging tool (for free!), but when it comes to building User Interfaces, my bets are on APEX. As for winning prizes (first price is a trip to Oracle Headquarters in SF, USA), I don't think I'll be among the lucky ones...