Trent's Tech Tips

In APEX 4.2, it's nice and simple. Right click on the body node of the page tree view, and click create: After clicking create, you would be presented with all the possible region types: The rest is just a matter of following the steps. APEX 5, has a new page designer, and it took me a minute or so to figure out how to add a form region, since there seems to be a couple of options for adding regions! Firstly, in the centre column down the bottom of the page, you have a grid view of (almost) all the region types you can add. You can either drag them onto the visual layout of your page above, or right click and select where to add it to. The other option is on the left hand pane, right click and then select Create Region. . This will create a region with the type set as: "Static Content".  You then need to change the type on the right hand pane, and then fill out any region specific settings. At this point, it's probably ...

APEX comes with a nice region type which is a tree view. During the wizard creation, you have the option to add buttons to expand all and collapse all nodes - but after the fact, there is no option in the tree settings to add this functionality - so you either have to recreate the tree region specifying that option or have to know what you have to do in order to add in that functionality. I came across this post on the OTN forums - http://forums.oracle.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=4407552#4407552 - which give all the information about what you have to do to expand and collapse all nodes (I'm sure there are others, but that just happened to be the one I found). This basic gist of it is this - there are two convenience functions to do the expanding and collapsing of all nodes - apex.widget.tree.expand_all(tree_id) and apex.widget.tree.collapse_all(tree_id), respectively - where tree_id is the unique identifier of the tree. You can either hard code it in (which is what is do...

Wanted to have a go at making a family tree, and came across this API. It is worth noting this particular chart doesn't allow you to specify more than one node for the parent, so not exactly perfect for a family tree. See:  http://code.google.com/p/google-visualization-api-issues/issues/detail?id=162 . I believe it worthwhile to read the getting started guide for google visualizations: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/using_overview.html and the actual guide for using the organizational chart: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/orgchart.html . Why use this over the charts provided in APEX? For one thing, there is no organizational chart available, to my knowledge. For another, it is not flash ;-) That can only be a good thing! Alright, down to business. Firstly create a table to store the data: CREATE TABLE "PERSON" ( "PERSON_ID" NUMBER NOT NULL ENABLE, "NAME" VARCHAR2(200 BYT...