Carl Backstrom's Blog

Sometimes it's amazing how much you can work with some technology and just miss some of the fundamentals.

I use PL/SQL and the htp.p() and htp.prn() functions all the time but
never really noticed the difference between the two, which isn't huge till it bites you when your trying to do something.

So what's the difference do you ask?

htp.prn() inserts a newline after printing it's string
htp.p() does not insert a new line.

Why would it make a difference do you ask? Well just try to get exactly
that XML feed you need without picking the right one, from personal
experience sometimes you'll be tearing your hair out for hours.  

Take a look here http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=11933:54 for a quick visual example.

Another thing I learned today was some Regular Expressions, I've never
really gotten my head around them but in working on the OPEN Apex Wiki
I need to and am slowly learning.

I found these couple threads in the OTN forums by cd
to be very valuable and am eagerly awaiting Part 3.

Part 1: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=427716
Part 2: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=430647

I even created my own simple example
http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=11933:52 to quickly test out
different REGEXP_REPLACE() examples hopefully someone else finds it
useful.

Learning a couple new things on a random Tuesday isn't bad , now to just keep from forgetting them by tomorrow : ).



Finally though it's a little late I had a new code example (Save Large
Value) uploaded to the Sample Code Section of the Application Express
area of OTN.
I'm pretty happy with this example as it is being used on multiple of
the packaged applications we will be providing and will most likely
make it into the product. It's fairly simple widget that gets around a
pretty large shortcoming of PL/SQL.



I'm almost done with my Show/Hide regions with memory and Ajax
Collection Control examples as well. Show/Hide regions with memory is
something that people always ask for and the Ajax
Collection Control is a basic piece of functionality for Application
Express that will allow people to build very complex and robust Ajax
functionality,



Carl