APEX

Stung by the criticism of our Football Web Pages APEX application, we decide to try to address the various issues raised by end users and peer code review. When clicking ‘Fixtures’, I get ‘ORA-20999: REST Data Source returned an HTTP error: HTTP 400: Bad request’ If you enter a Competition only, it works fine. If you enter a Team only, it works fine. If you enter both a ‘Competition’ and ‘Team’, the results look weird. Should ‘Team’ be a cascading LOV based on the ‘Competition’ ? The column names and labels need tidying up. There are a lot of meaningless ID fields displayed. It would be nice to have the option to review past results separately from fixtures in the future. Performance - the Popup LOV’s for Competition and Team are sluggish. Why are they so S L O W ? The navigation menu looks chaotic and ugly. HTTP 400 error entering Fixtures report This error is because the REST parameter for ‘Competition’ or ‘Teams’ is required. When we first run this page, there no values defined for the ‘Competition’ or ‘Teams’ parameters which results in the error. ...

In the last article, we created a simple APEX application fetching data about English football from the Football Web Pages site which provides an authenticated REST API. However, all I really want to do is to quickly look at Kingstonian’s forthcoming fixtures for the next month. Fortunately, there is an FWP API providing that information. Endpoint: https://football-web-pages1.p.rapidapi.com/fixtures-results.json Matches - The current list of matches for a competition/team The following parameters may be set: comp - The ID of the competition (note: one of “comp” or “team” is required) team - The ID of the team (note: one of “comp” or “team” is required) We already have created an APEX report listing all the available Competitions (including the numeric ID values) so it would be useful to have a similar report listing all the Teams. ...

Introduction The last article provided a quick introduction to REST APIs. Now we will use a simple REST API to develop an APEX application using a real world example. Football Web Pages I enjoy watching football (soccer). My local team are Kingstonian FC, a non-league team in South West London. Kingstonian play in the seventh tier of English football. Kingstonian’s players are semi-professional so the players hold down jobs and train and play part-time. ...

Data masking with APEX Background A common customer requirement is to mask sensitive or personally identifiable data from APEX reports. Oracle has a ‘Data Masking and Subsetting’ product that performs this task. However, for smaller APEX projects, the full blown data masking product might be overkill as it needs familiarity with the product and configuration. This may be time consuming and expensive. However, we are able to use the PL/SQL package DBMS_REDACT to achieve the same result. ...