Oracle Magazine - September/October 2010

Return to the Customers page by
selecting Page -> Home Page from the
menu. Now you’ll add two new sections
to the home page. One will contain the
Product Information report you just created,
and the other will contain automatically
generated navigation links for the applica-
tion. Follow these steps:
In the 1. Page list on the right-hand side,
click New Section, click Data, select
Report for Data Selection Source, select
Product Information for Report, click
Next, click Next, and click Create.

Click 2. New Section, select Navigation, select Section Navigation, click Next, enter 1 for Sequence, and click Create. The Navigation section, which appears at the top of the page, looks like the one in Figure 1.

Try clicking the navigation links to test their functionality.

ADDING A DATA GRID

Data grids enable users to maintain data that’s specific to the current Websheet application. Data grids are automatically maintained within Oracle Application Express, eliminating the need for users to create tables with primary keys, sequences, and triggers. To create a data grid, you can either specify columns declaratively or import a spreadsheet as the basis for the data grid.

Follow these steps to create a data grid that contains information about sales events: From the Magazine application’s menu, 1.

click Data -> Create.

Select 2. Data Grid, click Next, select From Scratch, and click Next. Enter Events for Name. Enter the following column names and corresponding types: Event Date (Type: Date), Name (Type: String), Location (Type: String), Cost (Type: Number), and Sales (Type: Number). Click Create.

Click 3. Add Row.

Use the date picker to select 4. Event Date, enter values for the remaining fields, and click Save and Add Another.

Repeat these steps to add three more 5. records with different costs and sales, and then click Save.

An updatable interactive report showing
the events appears. Make the following
changes to it:
Edit a date by clicking a specific date 1.
and selecting a new date from the date
selector that pops up. The new value will
be saved to the data grid.

SHARING WEBSHEET APPLICATIONS Oracle Application Express enables you to define authentication and authorization for Websheet applications. For each application, the application administrator can choose Oracle Application Express account credentials, single sign-on, LDAP, or custom values for authentication. Applications can also allow read-only access to a Websheet for users who don’t log in to the application. If administrators use Oracle Application Express account authentication, they can implement custom access control lists (ACLs) to define which users have administrator, contributor, and reader rights to the application.

CONCLUSION

The development and runtime environments for Oracle Application Express Websheets are merged, enabling users to define their own application content. They can build Web pages that incorporate text, images, internal links, and URLs; run SQL queries against their schemas’ Oracle Database tables; and manage data locally in data grids. Websheet applications are a boon to business users who want to collaborate by communicating data, images, and textual information efficiently. W

David Peake (david
. peake@oracle.com)
is a principal product
manager in Oracle’s
Server Technologies
division. He has been
with Oracle since 1993.