Wednesday, August 26, 2009

APEX 3.2.1 Patch set available - Free Gantts and Maps

Oracle released APEX 3.2.1 patch set. You can download it from the APEX website.

It will do a lot of fixes as you can read in the patch set notes, some of my favorites are:

  • Unable to use greater than character (>) in expression in CASE statement of computed column.
  • Unable to import SQL script using SQL Workshop, SQL Scripts, Import utility.
  • Degraded performance using interactive reports over time.
But another good reason for you to upgrade is because you get AnyGantt and AnyMap for free with it. Until APEX 4.0 comes out you need to write the xml yourself to generate the chart.
I've already some examples about Gantts and Maps on our Anychart Integration Kit website, but I'm working on releasing some more.

10 comments:

John Scott said...

They are not free....

They are a no-extra cost feature of the database ;)

J

Stew said...

LOL @ John's comment!

Dimitri - Dumb question. If 3.2.1 includes the AnyChart and AnyGantt libraries, what does your integration kit provide? Your intro web page says it will let Apex talk with AnyChart 5, but I would expect Apex 3.2.1 to talk with the included version of AnyChart and AnyGantt, no?

I feel like there's something really obvious I'm just not catching.

Thanks,

Stew

Stew said...

Sorry, needed to sign in w/ Google, THEN indicate that I wanted follow-up comments emailed.

Dimitri Gielis said...

Hi Stew,

With APEX 3.2.1 you get Anychart 3.3 in standard charts, and Anychart 4.2 with Interactive Reports charts.

The Gantts and the Maps are separate.

So Anychart 5 is not yet included in this version of APEX as far as I'm aware of. Anychart 5 comes with APEX 4.0

Hope that clarifies,
Dimitri

Stew said...

Oops, I see where I went wrong by mixing the news from your blog post above with your Info page on the AnyChart Integration Kit. Thanks for that clarification.

But I'm still a bit confused. Your blog post said:

> But another good reason for you to upgrade is because you get AnyGantt and AnyMap for free with it.

But your reply said:

> The Gantts and the Maps are separate.

If you get "AnyGantt and AnyMap for free" with Apex 3.2.1, how can they be separate?

Thanks,

Stew

p.s. Shouldn't you be in bed about now??? ;-)

Dimitri Gielis said...

Hi Stew,

To get the Gantt charts and Maps working you need another swf than the charts. That is what I meant with "separate". If you look at the Anychart website they are different products.
Hope that makes sense.

Dimitri

John Scott said...

Stew,

I see where you're coming from.

However the key thing to remember is that we were offering the Gannts and Maps long before the latest (3.2.1) patch for APEX.

The 'advantage' of the IK (if you want to look at it that way) is that we'll bridge the gap between the latest version of Anychart and the packaged version you get with APEX since Anychart are already working on new and improved things, which will (most likely) be provided bundled with APEX at some point in a future release...however if you want that right now then you can get it via the IK.

Hope this helps to clarify where we're positioning the IK.

John.

Anonymous said...

"To get the Gantt charts and Maps working you need another swf than the charts. That is what I meant with "separate". If you look at the Anychart website they are different products.
Hope that makes sense." I have a question about your reply.
Is the swf for Maps included in new patch set 3.2.1? Or can it be downloaded from some place?

Sowji

Tine said...

I'm not sure where to post this, so I'd be glad if you could point me to the right place .. anyway .. some of my enhancement requests for apex:

I'm not sure if any of these have already been discussed, but hey!, some requests should sometimes be expressed more than once. :)

One nice feature already present is ability of a report to self-reload while navigating through pages (using $a_report javascript call) .. eventhough a thing like $x('pFlowStepId').value = "13"; must be put into javascript code sometimes. Well, this could be improved. And if so, why not add an option to show custom "Loading.." image or message while waiting for data to load?

Another thing that is realy bothering me is waiting (probably for the sql to execute) everytime I switch a page in report. I also work with Oracle Forms 6i and there, predefined number of records is fetched and kept in buffer, so the scrolling and pagination works smoothly for at least this number of records. So, if we would expect small number of records to retrieve (around 100 or so), we could retrieve all of them at once and do whatever with them when in cache.

I'm missing a posibility to set "Number of Rows" and "Maximum Row Count" to undefined (empty) values which would meen that I want to get all the rows from my query and display them all without pagination. If I set "Number of Rows" = [empty] I get "ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error: character to number conversion error".

Unknown said...

ORacle Apex 3.2.1,
Flash Charts created using pages show Anychart version as 3.3.
Interactive reports however show that the Chart version in 5.1.3.

I had 2 questions?
Why is there a difference.

How to get the Pages to show charts in the Anychart version 5.1.3. Need this because of the improved look and feel and user interaction capabilities.