Bug: APEX_ITEM.DATE_POPUP2 calendar’s button disappear when you have more than 100 rows on a report

This has been tested on APEX 5.0.0.00.31 and 20.1.0.00.13 as of August 20th, 2020, so it has been around for some time.

If you add a date_popup APEX item to a report without setting the p_item_id parameter, like this:

apex_item.date_popup2( p_idx =>1
                     , p_value => sysdate + n)

APEX will assign a generic ID for the input in the form of apex_date_idx_row. So for the example above you will have apex_date_01_00, apex_date_01_01, apex_date_01_02, and so on. When you reach row number 101, it assigns apex_date_01_10 (instead of _01_101) and stays like that until row 111 where it changes to apex_date_01_11 (instead of _01_110). This makes APEX fail to be able to render the calendar box to the side, so the popup is unusable for that row.

You can see a quick example of the issue here, moving in the pagination until you reach N > 100: https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=28213:5

APEX seems to cap the length of that string and this causes the missing extra numbers at the end. I would check any of your reports that use popups to validate the correct rendering of the extra elements of the inputs.

The quick solution is to specify p_item_id when creating your apex_item to avoid using the generated ID.

I just wanted to put this up here, in case someone finds this useful in the future.

APEX Office Print 101: Oracle APEX Document Printing

This is the beginning of a series of entries that revolve around APEX Office Print and its integration with Oracle APEX.


A usual requirement from the clients with whom I have worked, and that have applications in Oracle APEX, is to be able to print their data, reports, and forms quickly, with options for multiple formats and types of documents. Every Oracle APEX consultant has faced this issue at least once in his career, which can cause headaches since there are not many ways to do this out of the box, and the customization options are quite limited.

The decision to create Printer Friendly pages (an option that many of us considered when we were working with previous APEX versions like 3.x and 4.x) causes a huge technological debt, leaving the application at the mercy of each browser particularities and any change that the theme and templates assigned to the application may suffer in the future.

Several external solutions can help solve this problem, including BI Publisher, PL / PDF, and AOP, the latter being the one we will be checking in this post. Continue reading APEX Office Print 101: Oracle APEX Document Printing

Oracle Cloud

Autonomous Database in 2019

This is part of a series of topics that revolve around Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Cloud.

It was two years ago, during the Oracle OpenWorld 2017, that Larry Ellison presented Oracle’s Autonomous Database in the Cloud, a database that achieves its automation through a machine learning layer that is responsible for managing and updating the system, applying adjustments and patches while it is in operation and without the need of a human being watching it, being able to even detect and counteract cyber attacks in real-time.

Larry Ellison, one of Oracle's leading spokespersons
Larry Ellison, one of Oracle’s leading spokespersons (Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

Under this concept, it is not strange that the technology was presented as “revolutionary” and as “true computing on-demand”, even more considering the points highlighted in the Oracle executive’s speech:

  • Requires a minimum of human work, by automating the necessary security updates and adjustments while running, minimizing downtime.
  • Service level agreements (SLA) that guarantee 99.995% annual availability, which represents a failure time of fewer than 30 minutes per year.
  • Lower administration costs compared to the competition, given its automatic and intelligent nature in combination with compression and learning algorithms.

This last point was especially emphasized by making several comparisons with Amazon, which is the main competitor of the company. He demonstrated that the operation could be five to eight times more expensive than an Oracle Autonomous Database implementation with the same workload.

With all this, some questions arise: Has Oracle managed to keep its promises two years after its initial presentation? Is the Autonomous Database a truly suitable option for companies that want to migrate their services to the cloud? Continue reading Autonomous Database in 2019