ODTUG Kscope 11

I'll be speaking at ODTUG Kscope 11 next week in Long Beach, California. I've attended this conference for the past three years and it's always been an amazing time. Some of the world's best Oracle and APEX developers will be there. One of the best things I found is that everyone is extremely friendly and very approachable.

Here are the talks that I'm giving this year:

APEX 4 + HTML 5 = Awesome
Tuesday June 28, 11:15 AM-12:15 PM, Room: 202C

HTML 5 consists of many new features which will make developers’ jobs a lot easier and improve end-user experience. HTML 5 is currently under development but many browsers already support some of its features. APEX developers should be aware of these enhancements. This presentation will highlight some of the HTML 5 features and how to integrate them with your APEX application to produce stunning results.

How to Be Creative II
Thursday June 30, 8:30 AM-9:30 AM, Room: 202B

This presentation will demonstrate how to leverage the APEX dictionary, along with existing plug-ins, to enhance your APEX applications. It will include how to automate monitoring of your application, improve testing capabilities, improve development time, and provide some tweaks to enhance end-user experience.

If things work out I'll be giving away copies of the two books I co-authored (Beginning Oracle
Application Express 4 and Expert Oracle Application Express) at each of my presentations (if this sounds like a bribe it is, especially for the Thursday morning presentation following the Wednesday night party :-). Hope to see you there!

Beginning Oracle Application Express 4 - Author Podcast

I recently recorded a podcast, along with some of the other authors, about writing Beginning Oracle Application Express 4. Here's some more information about the podcast:

A conversation with Patrick Cimolini, Martin D'Souza, and Doug Gault; Authors of Beginning Application Express 4.

David Peake, Principal Product Manager for APEX, chats with some of the authors of Beginning Application Express 4. They will discuss various aspects about the book including the main reason for the book, who the book is focused towards, and some behind the scene information about writing the book.

Highlight Words in Standard Reports

After creating a plugin I received a lot of questions about how to enable column highlighting as shown in the following screen shot:

Column highlighting is not part of the plug-in. It is a built-in feature in APEX that has been around for a very long time. They're two ways to enable column highlighting in standard reports. The first is through the create report wizard. When you enable searching, as shown below, the columns that are selected to be searchable will automatically have column highlighting enabled on then.

To manually highlight a column edit the column. Scroll down to the Column Formatting region shown below. In the Highlight Words field you can enter a comma delimited list of words to search for or reference APEX items using the &ITEM_NAME. syntax. Note: for more on APEX variable syntax read this post.