With the release of the Instant Client for Mac OS X you can now build OCCI based applications targetting modern Macs using Leopard on Intel. However, there is very little help available for building these apps using XCode, and if you hit the same problem we did (see below) then perhaps this post may be helpful.

As you may have gleaned from other posts we do a lot of development using Macs, specifically MacBooks and iMacs. We might develop products that run on Linux, Windows or Solaris but that doesn't stop us using our Macs to actually do the work!

We just had a real hair-puller of a problem so thought we'd blog about it here just in case someone else sees something similar. We had been sent a text file (.sql) of SQL Server 'CREATE TABLE' statements that we were manually converting to Oracle syntax just using TextEdit (OK, I know there are better editors but it was a small job and TextEdit was fine).

Here's a little trick we discovered for converting tab delimited text to comma separated (CSV). You'll need access to a Unix, Linux or Mac OS X machine as it relies on the 'tr' command line not present on Windows.

We recently had a situation that required a little bit of head scratching. We had a page with a Select List with Redirect that was used to populate some form fields based on the contents of the Select List. The users could change the values in the form and save them, but if they changed the Select List before using the 'Save' button then the changes would be lost. What we wanted to do was add a confirmation message to make sure the user saved the details before changing the Select List.

Often it can be useful to populate one field on a form based on the content of another in a live and dynamic fashion. Luckily this is easily achieved using the Javascript API supplied as part of ApEx 3.1.

Recently we had to make a couple of minor tweaks to a couple of ApEx theme images stored in an XE installation. At first we scratched heads a little but then found a helpful post on the ApEx forum which made it much easier. All we needed to do was work out how to do this using Mac OS X Leopard. Luckily, it's also very easy!

The simplest way to change the background colour of an ApEx page is to edit the template using the Application Builder.

We just spotted this new ApEx book on Amazon entitled "Pro Oracle Application Express" :

It's not released yet but looks good, and is written by two giants of the ApEx scene, John Scott and Scott…

Since version 9, Oracle has had support for XML data built into the heart of the database. Sometimes however, it is not immediately obvious how to get data from an XML string, particularly if, like me, it's not something you do that often!