An APEX Database Monitoring App for XE – Guilty GUI pleasures

Guilty pleasures. For some, it’s a “diet” burger with “diet” fries, washed down with a “diet” shake. Others have a penchant for Kurt Geiger shoes. “I’m Welsh and I’m worth it”, they may well say. It may even be that Def Leppard track nestled in your playlist between Coldplay and Oasis.

In programming terms, APEX seems to fall into this category for me. On the one hand, it’s a declarative development environment. This means that, unless you’re very careful, the application you write for it is not going to be too portable to other front-end technologies. But, oh, it’s so nice to be able to bang out a bit of SQL and/or PL/SQL, click my mouse in the right place, and have a nice GUI application drop onto my browser.

If you’ve decided to try the latest and greatest APEX version on your XE installation, you’ll notice that the default Database Welcome Page disappears after the upgrade.
Rather than hunting around for it, I’ve decided to knock up something a bit better…well, different.
So, if you’d like to know how to get some interesting configuration information out of the database…or just want the entertainment value of watching me blunder about in APEX then read on…

APEX – Getting back to where you came from

Ah, sunny Milton Keynes. There’s no place like it. Nestling in the heart of England, halfway between London and Birmingham, my home town has plenty to recommend it.
Yes, many of my countrymen like to poke fun at the Concrete Cows that are Milton Keynes’ most famous landmark. However, the one irrefutable benefit of living here, especially if you tend toward the geeky, is that Milton Keynes is also the home of the National Museum of Computing, hosted in Bletchley Park.
One thing about Milton Keynes is the interminable roundabouts throughout the city. Just keep turning left at every roundabout and you’ll be guaranteed to end up back where you started.

The same however, cannot be said of APEX – at least, not without a little bit of work.

In the example that follows, we have a page in an APEX application that can be invoked from a number other pages. The target page has a back button to return to the page you just came from. The question is, how do you make the target page re-direct back to the correct calling page ?
It must be said that the solution that follows can best be described as crude but effective. I’d be interested to hear if you come up with a more elegant solution.
Anyway, here goes….