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. ...

Background REST API’s are a popular means of manipulating data. REST API’s use a client-server model. The server is a web server and the client is a Web application or a Python, Perl, Java, .NET, Node.js or COBOL program. REST is an abbreviation for ‘Representational State transfer’ while API is another abbreviation for ‘Application Program Interface’. This all sounds complicated and almost intimidating but it’s not. Database developers have been manipulating data using a client (SQL*Plus) from a server (Oracle database) for many years. ...

a brief history of blogging I have maintained a blog, on and off, for a long time (since 2005). During that time I have used a wide variety of blogging platforms (Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, Drupal, Tumblr, Django, Posterous, Jekyll, Ghost, Nikola, Hugo) My blog was a personal blog. Looking back, some posts were essentially micro-blogging (trite one-liners), link blogging (interesting, amusing BBC news stories), endless analysis of Manchester United together with some longer form articles. ...

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. ...