Thursday, June 05, 2008

Using Interactive APEX Report in a Fun way

You don't know Interactive Reports in Oracle Application Express yet? You miss something.
From APEX 3.1 onwards there's a killer feature included in APEX: Interactive Reports.

You can turn a boring report into an interactive one, where you can play with the data, do sums, averages, highlighting rows based on a condition, search and sort in an intuitive way and a lot more.

I didn't think about using it in DG Tournament until my brother asked me if he could have a special Bet ranking. He wanted to have a rank where he could see only his friends or the people playing in his group. I told him it was already possible by using the location field (which I also wrote in my FAQ).

It made me thinking... I also wanted to see in one view how I'm doing with the rank compared to my family or the people in Belgium or everybody. Another feature I wanted to have was to go back in time. When a game is played I adapt the score and the betting gets calculated, but wouldn't it be interesting to see what your rank was before the latest game and now?
Wouldn't it be nice if we could just save all these reports so next time when you login you can see it again?


All that and a lot more (for ex. highlighting) is now included in DG Tournament! And the good thing about it, DG Tournament is completely written in APEX, so it did take me almost no time to implement this new feature! I believe this is the first time the Interactive Reports make a use in a fun way, as this application is completely for fun ;-)

I wonder if non-APEX and non-technical people understand this feature. If you used the interactive report in DG Tournament, put a comment on this blog if it was difficult to use or if you found it fairly simple.

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