Oracle APEX

Monitoring your APEX application with Google Analytics is a must. It takes 5 minutes to set up in your APEX application and gives you lots of benefits. Advantages. Before go live we load tested our APEX app using JMeter, on the go live date we used Google Analytics to give us a real time view of how many users were logging in to see if it was getting close to the number of users we load tested the application with. Luckily, it was only around 10% of the amount of users we load tested and everything went OK. You get access to the free  Google Data Studio to create embeddable reports. We embedded reports in our APEX app back office showing views per day, browser usage etc.  It's a University staff APEX application, so interesting to see usage during the week compared to weekends. View browser and operating system's usage statistics, which allows us to target testing on browsers for upcoming releases. Analytics showed us Edge was surprisingly the second most popular browser (aft

This is the first of a series of posts where I will show you how you can use Jenkins , Selenium , JMeter and Maven to test, monitor and create a continuous integration pipeline for your APEX application. This is part 1, S et-up Jenkins to monitor your APEX app and get alerted when your app is unavailable . Creating a simple Jenkins job that takes 5 minutes to set up, your APEX application will be monitored 24 hours a day, and you will get alerted as soon as it becomes unavailable.  You can then build on this using free open source software to run web ( Selenium ) and database ( JMeter ) tests on your APEX app controlled by  Jenkins , which will I describe in upcoming posts. In upcoming posts, I will show you how to set up Jenkins to; Run web (Selenium) tests on your APEX application.   Schedule web tests logging into your APEX app running tests using Selenium and Maven and get notified of any failures . Schedule deployment of your APEX dev env nightly to a test env.  Deploy your APEX a

Sending emails from your APEX application using APEX Email Templates is super simple. The project specification was to add buttons to a form to allow users to press a button to email students whether they have been successful or unsuccessful in their scholarship application. This is how we did it.  The application form is a standard APEX form where we will add a button to the form that when pressed will send an email; In this example I will walk you through the creation of the rejection email.  First, we created a new email template for rejection emails with the name REJECTION ; with the following identification; To send images in the email ensure they are hosted on a publicly available site.  In this case, I hosted the University of Glasgow logo on my Google Drive and put it in the header of the email using the HTML IMG tag; The body is standard HTML using  substitution strings   (Special substitution strings available within a template are denoted by the number symbol (#). For exa

Add a time-series chart to your APEX app using HighCharts and JQuery.  This is the third in the series of blog posts showing you how to add HighCharts to your APEX application. This is the most useful of the HighCharts in the series so far, easily turn your date data into an animated time series chart with a couple of lines of JavaScript Demo The chart reads the data points from an Interactive Report on the page. Create the Interactive Region with static ID  IR_STATIC_ID  using the following SQL source; select   TO_DATE ( '2003/07/09' ,  'yyyy/mm/dd' )  as   VALUE_1 ,  10   as   VALUE_2 ,  20   as   VALUE_3   from   DUAL UNION select   TO_DATE ( '2003/07/11' ,  'yyyy/mm/dd' )  as   VALUE_1 ,  20   as   VALUE_2 ,  40   as   VALUE_3   from   DUAL UNION select   TO_DATE ( '2003/07/13' ,  'yyyy/mm/dd' )  as   VALUE_1 ,  30   as   VALUE_2 ,  20   as   VALUE_3   from   DUAL UNION select   TO_DATE ( '2003/07/10' ,  'yyyy/mm/dd' )

How to add a timeline diagram chart to your APEX app using HighCharts and JQuery.  This is the second in the series of blog posts showing you how to add HighCharts to your APEX application. Demo I have been using HighCharts in my web apps for a number of years and in my opinion its the best charting JavaScript library out there, its free to use for non-commercial use, robust, well documented, mobile friendly and a great addition to your APEX app.   I work for the University of Glasgow and the next project I am starting is an APEX project where staff members apply for academic promotion. There are many stages to the application process, manager approval, board of review, college review, etc.  A timeline diagram displaying the process to the users will be ideal.  This is how I will do it. As an aside, for American readers  this   is a fascinating story I have recently learned about the University.  James McCune Smith born a slave and the first African American to receive a medical degree