When programming i usually do everything myself and recycle code when needed so for once i decided to try out a development platform to speed up the process so i picked oracle apex- only to find myself suffering with overchoice
Normally if wanted the user to give me some data id just make a form and the data just ends up on my database, not hard.
this isnt what i want to make, this is just for the sake of an example of the way one usually goes about this
another example
But now in oracle apex i dont even know if this is even the right way of asking end user to input data into a table, what should i do if -for example- i just want to make the user run some calculations and then store the results? Is there something specific that apex already has for this or do i do it myself normally
Any tutorials or the names of the functions i need to use would be helpful
I think maybe what you might want is Report with Form.
Its a setup the Page Wizard can make for you which is essentially exactly what you want. You select the table and columns, then it makes one page with a table of all entries, and you can click on an entry or click to make a new entry, and it opens up a form with the relevant page items which you input or edit, and then save.
Maybe a general APEX guide would be best for you since you are so new to it. Because if you know what is possible, then you might find different solutions to problems you have. I dont have a guide to recommend unfortunatelly, but I am sure you can find plenty on google, just make sure the version is correct, it doesent have to be for your exact version(there is a big difference pre 18 and post 18, less so with 19 and 20)
Yes, APEX can be a bit overwhelming in the beginning. Your question is very generic so it is hard to give you a detailed answer. In general, if you have the data in a single record, then a form is the way to go (easiest is to start with report and from). If you need to modify certain column data after user submit, you can do that in processes or computations before submit.
Feel free to ask a question with your specific business requirement - you're pretty sure to get an answer here.
Related
If you have an experience in UX or Security, please answer this question.
I am working in some project and we need to show the object id to the user.
So all edit form's has the id, the client ask for this --".
My doubt is, what is the best way to show the id in the form?
I did this way, the ID is just a text:
But some one is showing the ID as a disable input, but this seems wrong to me.
Can some tell me the best way to show the ID ? Maybe a third option.
And please explain your answer, I need to convince my team.
Thank's!!!!
An Information Architect here.
I think your first inclination: putting the ID in the visible field as text, is correct - provided the text is selectable.
Do not put text that can't be edited into what looks like an editable field, even if it looks disabled. You're telling the user "you can do SOMETHING to edit this number, but you're not doing it now, and I'm not telling you what you have to do, nor why you'd want to do it, nor what happens if you do". That'd be a really poor approach.
One other thing to think about: does it need to be the first thing in the form? Sure, the ID is probably the first field in the database, but it's probably not of first importance to the user. Order it so it makes sense to her.
Information in the page has a hierarchy, and the top and left of that hierarchy (in languages which read left-to-right) is where the most important thing the user needs to see should live.
(That doesn't mean you can't have a header with a top-left logo or top navigation on the page - of course you can. People understand what that stuff is - we're talking about the top-left of the content area).
If you need more background on information hierarchy, I suggest you search for information on "F-pattern reading" for a quick visual example of how people consume information in the page. The Poynter institute did, I think, the original research on this with an eye-tracking study.
You only show object id and name in the page. If that's all that's there, the page's simplicity means you don't need to think it much further through.
If there's more, you'll need to order the information in a way that's important to your user, and that's natural for completion (for example, an Address has many common components, and completion should occur in the order a user would write the address in the context of the local language).
To understand how well you've done with the page's usability, take your best shot, mock it up, then show it to a few (non-technical, non-project-manager) people. Hand them a pencil, and say "use the pencil as your mouse. Point and click on things to do [name of your task]. Don't tell people how to do it. Just ask them to point at things on a printout. This is called a paper prototype, and can be an inexpensive way to learn a lot about your design. Try this with maybe 5 people before you refine and start to code it up.
I'm not sure what the "Security" aspect is (is it a security product, or an IDM component?). If the question is "Can I show the user the object ID?", you'll have to answer that in the context of your internal security model. You'll need to estimate what you're protecting when the object ID is not shown, what's at risk when it is.
Ideally, your system would prevent a malicious user who knows the object ID from doing anything with the known information, and from harvesting object IDs in bulk.
Of course the correct solution is not to show the ID of an object. IDs (along with object) are internal technical terminology, the user does not care that you use an id to uniquely refer to an object in a database.
Just remove the ID field entirely.
I would like to create a text based RPG game for iPhone. In this user will have some questions with answers, and navigate to the next page depends on the answer in which the user selects. As per the requirement I have to store the entire story in the app itself. And I need to access each event in the story, when the user selects. So which kind of database can I use?
Please share your ideas.
Thanks.
I'm not so sure you need to create some type of off-device database. If the game has predefined answers and questions then you should probably load the app with each of these on the device.
I'm sure there are plenty of ways to go about this, the simplest being if/else statements. This would obviously be a hindrance and easy to mess up if the storyline is long.
One thing that comes to mind would be to design the story using a Tree representation. The starting point would be the root of the tree, and from there the user would progress down the tree until it eventually reaches a leaf (end). Depending on the number of options a user has for each page, this really wouldn't be too tough to implement if you have any knowledge of this type of data structure.
But, this is just off the top of my head. I would definitely consider the use of a Tree data structure though.
I'm new to iOS Development and am trying to make an application that essentially sorts through a list of 300 names or so. I've got the Drill-Down part of the application down, aside from the detailView, but am now faced with a challenge.
What I would like to do is have users select from 3 fields with a UIPickerView to come up with shorter lists for every time a user is looking for a person. I'd like to use a .plist, but I also have an XML feed of the information. Before I waste all of my time structuring these data sources, does anybody have a good overview as to how I should approach this?
Also, I've asked some this question before, and they tell me to read up on introductory iOS development topics. I understand the mechanics of development, I just can't ever figure out how to approach a task properly. (I'm working on it!)
Thanks in advance. I'd share an image to help clarify, but my rep isn't high enough.
Snip: It looks like I misread your intention which makes my earlier comments irrelevant, you want to have the user select one of 3 options to shrink the list, if I'm not mistaken.
Some more questions for you, so I take it that this XML feed is going to be potentially changing between times that the user loads up the app? Will it only ever grow or are those 300 or so names that are loaded once set for good? The reason I ask so that you can maybe see my train of thought is whether or not using Core Data might be useful. You could easily store your large list locally, save time having to reload this large list frequently, and also you can use the built fetchedObjectController to search your collection of names. I'll keep thinking about it and once you get a chance to answer these questions we can continue.
Ill check back for an edit or comment, and see if I can give you an approach. Also, maybe edit your question with any of your own approach ideas and we could also start from there and refine them if needed.
Edit 2: From the information in the comments this is one of the ways that I could see this being done that make sense to me:
Since you seem to be able to control the information you receive from the feed I would set it up to send you only the contacts that need to be added/removed. You could handle this a few ways depending on your deployment intentions but I would go with the following:
Find a way to signal a first time run of the application, and as a result all contacts would be new, and you could populate your list fully with a slightly longer first time setup. Then any further changes could be quickly handled by smaller edits made to the local list.
You would need to set up Core Data for your application, which should be fairly straightforward in your case, and after this you can use the built in NSFetchRequest to do your searches that will then quickly return a list of narrowed down contacts. As for the physical picker that is just a matter of building the UI which will require some design from your end as you are the only one that knows what you are going for in that regard. Depending on the complexity of your app and what functionality you will want to include you could get away with 1-2 views that simply do the displaying of the contacts in a table and then the picker just reloads when appropriate.
I'm not familiar with the implementation of XML Feeds and receiving data from them, but I have done XML Response parsing into Core Data from a SOAP service before and they shouldn't be terribly different.
Regarding resource to get you started should you need them, I would recommend the following:
eBooks:
http://www.techotopia.com/index.php/Objective-C_2.0_Essentials
http://www.techotopia.com/index.php/IPhone_iOS_4_Development_Essentials_Xcode_4_Edition
Tutorials:
http://www.raywenderlich.com/
The eBooks I have linked are both absolutely fantastic and one of the few xCode 4.0 books that I was able to find that seemed to be of an actual usable quality. They both contain easy to follow and clear tutorials on simple and more advanced aspects of programming for iOS.
Ray's site is an immensely helpful resource as it contains both a very active forum base for iOS programming in addition to a constantly growing tutorial collection as there are 4-5 people that constantly are creating new tutorials that the community votes on and suggests every week. It contains some more advanced topics than the above books and I would recommend looking at it after doing a few walk through/tutorials from the books.
I'll stick around if you have any further questions, otherwise you can send me a notification via these comments, or just post another question and someone is bound to help you out!
-Karoly
This is pretty wide question, but I'm hoping to get a push in the right direction (technologies and methodology).
Ok, I have an iphone app (which I am developing) that works with a web service (c#) through http requests. The web service connects to the underlying database, extracts the necessary data depending on the request and feeds it back to the application.
Now, I need to implement a search system in the app. The user searches for some words, and I need to provide the most relevant results. The search must be performed on different tables in the database. Each table can be searched in a number of columns. For example, when searching through the people table I need to search in the first name, lastname, company, and other fields. Other tables have other important columns.
I have so many questions that I don't even know where to start.
How do I make my sql queries to make the search, but still be fast enough. Do I need to make some extra tables with indexed content somehow?
How should I add relevance factor to the results so I can ultimately filter only the most relevant results? For example, if an user searches for Smith, maybe there is a person named Smith or even a Company. They should be displayed before any other content that can have smith in the description.
I know the question is a little vague/wide but I can explain more if somebody desires.
Thank you
This kind of depends on which language/rdbms you are using on your server. You might checkout various DB search solutions like Sphinx which will do all of that indexing for you and provide a simple Search API. Sphinx for example allows you to prioritize columns, define character mappings (ß->s, ä->a) etc.
In the end I have decided to use Lucene. It's a wonderful piece of technology and even if I had some doubts in the beginning, after reading 3/4 of the book called "Lucene in Action" it was clear to me that it had everything I needed (and much more).
I know it's not a fully-functional searching system (with all the elements needed), but merely a library handling the core of a search system. It will need some work to integrate it with my application/webservice/database. I will let you know how it goes :)
Thanks for your input!
Could anyone help me? I need to insert information to the header of a pdf from a customer form online with php. I am not a programmer so I need a sense of direction before I speak to my developers.
The idea is to get licence information from a field, insert the information to the header and save the result as securely as is reasonably possible before the customised file is downloaded.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
This will generally involve opening your existing PDF file with an appropriate PDF manipulation module (Zend_Pdf works for this purpose), performing whatever operations you need, such as inserting data into the document, and then outputting the document to the user with the appropriate headers (content type and disposition) set.
If you want customers to be able to download files several times, it would be wise to have the licensing information be gathered from the user account information, rather than a form.
First of all, asking for information on a particular library or tool to use is off bounds for StackOverflow (as it draws mostly opinionated answers. But even more importantly, in my experience, going to your developers and telling them which library to use while you don't know anything about it and are not a developer, is not generally a good idea. Focus on what you want to accomplish; don't worry too much about what technically is needed for them to do what you want. That's their job.
Looking at your question, there's a couple of things you might think about and discuss with them:
1) Taking information and adding it on top of an existing PDF file, is not the end of the world from a technical point of view. There are probably 100 or more different tools and libraries that can accomplish this in many different ways.
2) Much more technically challenging and worthy of a discussion with them is "save the result as securely as is reasonably possible before the customised file is downloaded". Normally, when you add information to a PDF document, it's not trivial to change it afterwards. But it's far from impossible. And if it's only a matter of removing stuff, it's even easier. A tool such as Adobe Acrobat for example will happily let you remove a bunch of text / graphics from a PDF file. If you want to prevent that, you have to at least protect your PDF document; set a number of flags in it that prevent it from being edited for example.
That's still not going to be waterproof, as these flags are supposed to be honoured by PDF processing applications. Adobe Acrobat does that and so do most other "decent" PDF applications, but it's certainly possible to circumvent this if you want it hard enough.
So, from your product management point of view, think about what reasonably secure means and have a discussion about that with your developers. That's probably going to get you much further than suggesting a particular library they're going to resent instantly because it comes from a non-developer :)