David S. Gale – APEX, Life, and what I think about it all

Removing HTML

October 9, 2015 by David Leave a Comment

Generally, for security purposes, it's a bad idea to allow users to enter HTML into any data that will be displayed to other users, since this can open the door to a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack. This is why, when you declare a text-based page … [Continue reading]

Check Authorization through PL/SQL

September 25, 2015 by David Leave a Comment

Here's another in my periodic "notes to myself" series. Today, I needed to include an authorization check within a PL/SQL region, since I wanted the region to always render, but some of the content needed to be restricted. This is one of those … [Continue reading]

APEX-Generated Table APIs

September 9, 2015 by David 2 Comments

Last week, a coworker on the SQLDeveloper team linked via his Twitter account to a blog post he'd written in 2013 about using SQL Developer to generate table APIs. I mentioned that this seemed very similar to functionality in APEX, which he wasn't … [Continue reading]

WriteTrack, Version 2!

September 2, 2015 by David 1 Comment

I'm very pleased to announce that I've released the new version of WriteTrack. The underlying concept hasn't changed, but the engine has been updated to APEX 5.0, the theme is a variant of the Universal Theme, and I've implemented several … [Continue reading]

Label Cannot Be Rendered error in Universal Theme

May 27, 2015 by David 4 Comments

The Universal Theme, which was introduced in APEX 5.0, has some really nice features. One of the coolest is that it's responsive--no matter what size window you're using, the pages should look decent and be fully functional. (Side note: back when I … [Continue reading]

Ironhand

April 13, 2015 by David 1 Comment

I don't post about it very often, but my wife is a self-published author. She focuses mainly on "speculative fiction"--fantasy mixed with sci-fi (in varying quantities). Here's a list of her published works. Full disclaimer: she has expressly … [Continue reading]

APEX 5.0 Hidden Gem: Developer Toolbar

April 7, 2015 by David 3 Comments

This week, we return to the Hidden Gems series. This gem isn't very hidden--you're likely to have seen it a lot already--but it's easy to overlook the power that it provides. I'm talking about the lowly developer toolbar. The toolbar in APEX 4.x … [Continue reading]

Upgrading Applications to the Universal Theme

March 30, 2015 by David 6 Comments

I'm going to take a short break from the Hidden Gems series (more gems coming, I promise!) to talk about the process of converting applications to the new Universal Theme (I'll call it UT for convenience) in APEX 5.0, because there are several items … [Continue reading]