Carl Backstrom's Blog

David Peake the Application Express PM has joined the blogging community with his blog.

Drop by and say hello and hassle him for some posts.

Actually the first rule is probably require user login.

So I've been watching the usage on my tagging functionality, and it's not quite what I was hoping for. While I know people were applying and adding tags there was significant amount of people that were applying and adding tags just any old page, probably just to see the nifty AJAX effect I'm sure ;).

So I'm turning off the user initiated tagging, and going with an administrative tagging setup, which is basically just me adding them. I'm actually going to replace my breadcrumbs with this since I think it will be more useful.

User entered tags would work great if I required login to my application and then people could tag pages with personal tags that only they could see. And then the tag package could create tag weights based on that compared against the administered tags.

I will be allowing for voting on tags to change their weights on page but you can only vote on tags the administrator has entered.

Anyway I should have PL/SQL package that can be plugged into any APEX application to provide tagging functionality next week. I'm thinking I might make a package that contains the tagging/rating/comments functionality into ones package , configurable of course.

If course there is always my regular 40 hour to think of but this is much funner ;)

So as I've stated before I almost always deal with static XSL files when building my XML/XSL to FOP transformations.

When I do almost always start with one of two generic XSL files as a starter. One is a Generic Report XSL and another is a Generic Name Value Pair XSL , I've cleaned them up a bit and some commenting and put them up for everybody to try out.

To use them just upload them as a Named Column Template XSL and then apply to any APEX report, the named value pair page breaks after each row because I usually use it to create pages where there is one item with lots of detail.





You will get a very generic PDF but it can used as a base for other XSL files.






These templates also show some extra XSL features, like xsl:if or xsl:choose and xsl:attribute-set. I'll be posting some more specifics on XML+XSL=FOP transforms over the next couple weeks using these two files as examples but for you people that like reverse engineering stuff these files will immediately be useful.

A working example and files for download can be found here.

http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=11933:139

I suggest this site for people unfamiliar with XSL and FOP
http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/default.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/xslfo/default.asp

And I personally use XMLSpy ,one of the few Windows programs I use , for working with XML and XSL files it can directly create PDF's from an XML+XSL transform.
http://www.altova.com/products/xmlspy/xml_editor.html