Nov 09 2011

Customize/Personalize Oracle APEX Workspace Environment

Category: 11g,APEX,Browser,Tool,URL — ittichai @ 4:06 pm

When you have multiple Oracle APEX environments, e.g., development, test, UAT and production, and for multiple groups, one of the confusing things is that sometimes developers are lost on which environment they’re working on. Most of technically proficient developers can make a distinction easily from the URLs they’re currently using. However, most of less technically proficient (e.g., business users) sometimes cannot.

A quick and simple solution here is to make a visual distinction on the APEX workspace pages especially on the logo area. Instead of using plain vanilla logo images, they are replaced with more distinct and informative images.

This is the default APEX workspace logon page.

Default Workspace Logon Image

This is a sample of the personalized workspace logon page with a company logo and it is showing that this is the development environment.

Customized APEX workspace logon page

This is the main workspace page after logon showing the default logo image.

Default Workspace Page

You can change it to be like this.

Customized APEX workspace development page

With just this minor change, our users feel more comfortable knowing that they’re working the right environment.

How to change it?

With a quick investigation, you can easily find the paths of those image files as follows:

Workspace logon page:

Image path: /i/apex/builder/apex-logo-white.gif
Image size: 300px x 30px
Transparent background

Image path:/i/apex/builder/apex-db-apps.png
Image size: 240px x 200px
Transparent background

Workspace main page after logon:
Image path: /i/htmldb/apex_logo.gif
Image size: 300px x 30px
White background

  • Use Photoshop or any image editing tools to recreate those image files.
  • Copy and replace those image files on the web server. Please make the backup of those files before replacing them.

Note that this approach will NOT work if you’re using a shared web server for multiple APEX database environments because they’re using the same image files.

Update: Using ApexLib script in the login message (under Manage Instance) as mentioned by Peter in the comment section is another solution for customization. I like this approach as not only you can customize the logo, but you can also change the description text on the workspace logon page. In addition, since the change is on the APEX instance itself, it can definitely be used on a shared web server.

Feb 21 2011

Delayed Message When URL redirect for Oracle APEX application

Category: APEX,Browser,PL/SQL,URL — ittichai @ 2:38 pm

I’ve recently moved our internal APEX applications to a new environment. We have new URL for applications. During the transition, even though users are informed with new URL and asked to switch to it, we still want the old URL to redirect to new one for a period of time to ensure the smooth transition.

Oracle APEX provides the redirect capability by making the application Unavailable then perform Redirect to URL. This feature can be found under the Availability section from Shared Components > Definition.

The Unavailable (Redirect to URL) works well if we would maintain the old URL. When user enters the old URL, they will be automatically redirected to new one. The redirect happens very quickly.

In our case, since the old URL will be retired, we’d would like users to be aware of the change. Before redirecting to new URL, we’d like to display a message informing about the move and asking them to take an appropriate action.

To do this, instead of using Unavailable (Redirect to URL), I will use Unavailable (Status Shown with PL/SQL) instead.

The PL/SQL block just simply writes a Javascript to perform redirect. We will give a 3-second delay for users to read the message before the redirect takes place.

BEGIN
  htp.p ('<html>');
  htp.p ('<head>');
  htp.p ('<script type="text/javascript">');
  htp.p ('function delayed_redirect() {');
  htp.p ('  window.location = "http://newURL.company.com"');
  htp.p ('}');
  htp.p ('</script>');
  htp.p ('</head>');
  htp.p ('<body onLoad="setTimeout(''delayed_redirect()'', 3000)">');
  htp.p ('<h1>The application has moved.</h1>');
  htp.p ('<h2>The redirect will NOT work after 3/1/2011. Please bookmark the new URL.</h2>');
  htp.p ('</body>');
  htp.p ('</html>');
END;

Here is what will be displayed for about 3 seconds before going to the new site.

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Mar 29 2009

Firefox Tweaks to Speed Up Page Load

Category: Browser,Firefox — ittichai @ 7:07 pm

I found this blog post: A handful of Firefox tweaks that will double your browser speed through one of tweets that came my way yesterday. You may find it useful if you use Firefox browser like I do  and have encountered slowness when loading pages. Is it my imagination or does my Firefox load a lot more quickly after the changes have been made? :-)

There are, however, some limitations in some of the changes which are not mentioned in above post. For example, the pipelining is not supported by all servers. Some servers may even function incorrectly if they receive pipelined requests.

All other Firefox tweaks can be found at Tweaking Preferences of MozillaZine.

Enjoy blazing speed! Fingers crossed.

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Dec 30 2008

Ubiquity for Oracle

Category: Firefox — ittichai @ 2:35 am

Ubiquity is the FireFox extension allowing you to perform tasks including wiki, map, dictionary, etc., while still staying on the same web page (instead of having to jump around pages).

Even though it is still in version 0.1.x, there is a quite number of commands (at Ubiquity Herd and Ubiquity In The Wild) being developed to use it.

Couple of them are developed as search tools for Oracle -

The first one “oradoc” (I like the most) is developed by Eddie Awad. With preview feature, it is easier to filter out information.

oradoc1

The second one “tahiti” is from Don Seiler at the Pythian group. This one has no preview. Thus upon pressing “Enter”, it will redirect to Oracle’s Tahiti site.

tahiti1

tahiti2

Last one “search-oracle-docs” from Mayuresh Kadu’s blog site is similar to that of Tahiti – no preview but redirected to the OTN’s documentation site.

search1

search2

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