Stung by the criticism of our Football Web Pages APEX application, we decide to try to address the various issues raised by end users and peer code review. When clicking ‘Fixtures’, I get ‘ORA-20999: REST Data Source returned an HTTP error: HTTP 400: Bad request’ If you enter a Competition only, it works fine. If you enter a Team only, it works fine. If you enter both a ‘Competition’ and ‘Team’, the results look weird. Should ‘Team’ be a cascading LOV based on the ‘Competition’ ? The column names and labels need tidying up. There are a lot of meaningless ID fields displayed. It would be nice to have the option to review past results separately from fixtures in the future. Performance - the Popup LOV’s for Competition and Team are sluggish. Why are they so S L O W ? The navigation menu looks chaotic and ugly. HTTP 400 error entering Fixtures report This error is because the REST parameter for 'Competition' or 'Teams' is required. When we first run this page, there no values defined for the 'Competition' or 'Teams' parameters which results in the error. ...

Flushed after the success of getting GoToSocial 0.5.2 working successfully, I was about to celebrate with a cup of tea when this post appeared in my timeline about the release of 0.6.0 (Release Candidate 1). Good morning everyone! We just cut the first release candidate for v0.6.0 of GoToSocial: v0.6.0-rc1. There’s a preposterous amount of changes included in this one (we’ll do a proper organized list when we do the release proper). ...

I like experimenting with software and technology. Many years ago, I built a Laconica instance. Not because I needed a Laconica instance but because I was curious and any knowledge gleaned would be useful. Standard LAMP stack. Same as the WordPress blogging software which I had already built. Plus Laconica releases were named after R.E.M songs by Evan. Similarly, I got an account on mastodon.sdf.org in preference to Twitter because I favour OpenSource software and the underdog. ...

In the last article, we created a simple APEX application fetching data about English football from the Football Web Pages site which provides an authenticated REST API. However, all I really want to do is to quickly look at Kingstonian’s forthcoming fixtures for the next month. Fortunately, there is an FWP API providing that information. Endpoint: https://football-web-pages1.p.rapidapi.com/fixtures-results.json Matches - The current list of matches for a competition/team The following parameters may be set: comp - The ID of the competition (note: one of “comp” or “team” is required) team - The ID of the team (note: one of “comp” or “team” is required) We already have created an APEX report listing all the available Competitions (including the numeric ID values) so it would be useful to have a similar report listing all the Teams. ...

Introduction The last article provided a quick introduction to REST APIs. Now we will use a simple REST API to develop an APEX application using a real world example. Football Web Pages I enjoy watching football (soccer). My local team are Kingstonian FC, a non-league team in South West London. Kingstonian play in the seventh tier of English football. Kingstonian’s players are semi-professional so the players hold down jobs and train and play part-time. ...

Background REST API’s are a popular means of manipulating data. REST API’s use a client-server model. The server is a web server and the client is a Web application or a Python, Perl, Java, .NET, Node.js or COBOL program. REST is an abbreviation for ‘Representational State transfer’ while API is another abbreviation for ‘Application Program Interface’. This all sounds complicated and almost intimidating but it’s not. Database developers have been manipulating data using a client (SQL*Plus) from a server (Oracle database) for many years. ...

a brief history of blogging I have maintained a blog, on and off, for a long time (since 2005). During that time I have used a wide variety of blogging platforms (Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, Drupal, Tumblr, Django, Posterous, Jekyll, Ghost, Nikola, Hugo) My blog was a personal blog. Looking back, some posts were essentially micro-blogging (trite one-liners), link blogging (interesting, amusing BBC news stories), endless analysis of Manchester United together with some longer form articles. ...

Data masking with APEX Background A common customer requirement is to mask sensitive or personally identifiable data from APEX reports. Oracle has a ‘Data Masking and Subsetting’ product that performs this task. However, for smaller APEX projects, the full blown data masking product might be overkill as it needs familiarity with the product and configuration. This may be time consuming and expensive. However, we are able to use the PL/SQL package DBMS_REDACT to achieve the same result. ...

This blog uses Hugo and was previously hosted on Amazon S3 storage. The traffic and hence the costs were minimal (zero). After recently having to completely re-install Arch Linux after an idiotic mistake, I realised that Hugo was out of date, my Hugo theme was out of date and I’d forgotten precisely how the deployment to S3 actually worked. I was toying with taking my ball home in a mindless fit of pique, migrating 1,000 posts to Eleventy and I also looked at the Publii static site CMS with interest. ...