APEX Tips and Tricks – Joes Techland

Horizontal Scrollbar on Interactive Reports:
- This is a common issue faced by a number of APEX customers who have large reports and want to scroll horizontally, but have to scroll to the bottom and get to the scrollbar.
- APEX dev team posted possible workarounds for this issue on the following OTN discussion thread.

Good Design Practice:
- Build your apex application better do less in apex
- Here is a copy of the response:
  - This is indeed a tricky problem to solve, especially when using any responsive user interface, such as Universal Theme.
  - The reason this happens is because components within a responsive ui are placed into a grid-based layout which is resized / re-positioned depending on the size of your screen. This also means that no content can escape the confines of this grid they are placed in, which is why the horizontal scrollbars appear at the bottom of the page rather than the bottom of your browser window.
  - Fortunately, there are ways around this, but you’ll need to think of the solution a little differently than simply adding scrollbars to the bottom of the page. Here’s an app I created on apex.oracle.com that showcases two methods to get this working.
  - Method 1 uses the Maximum Region Height attribute for Interactive Reports, and Method 2 uses the Maximize Button, which is my recommended approach for large reports.
  - Additionally, here is a link to which includes a workaround that adds horizontal scrollbars to the page with the help of some javascript.

Upgrade from Discoverer (Per APEX PM)
- Here is a presentation from Collaborate 2015 from John Peters (an independent contractor):
- Migrate your Discover Reports to Oracle APEX
- There is also a Packaged App that is part of the APEX distribution called Data Reporter which allows end users to define custom reports based on a whitelist of tables.
- My (biased) opinion: APEX is an excellent tool for replacing Discoverer reports.
- For existing Disco reports simply copy the SQL and then create an Interactive Report and paste the SQL query within APEX.
- Power users can readily be trained to create these applications for themselves, or use Data Reporter to allow less technical users to create ad-hoc reports.

Continuous Integration (Per APEX PM)

This is quite easy to integrate with any of the CI environments. You can use the command-line utility APEXExport to export application definitions and “deploy” them to another server using SQL*Plus. Alternatively, with the utility sqlcl, you can export APEX applications and import them in another environment – all from within sqlcl.

sqlcl is integrated with Oracle’s Developer Cloud Service and this supports the integration with Hudson. It’s a great example of this integration today.