I recently started reading this book and up till now didn't face any real problems. That is until I reached the "Rich User Interfaces" part in Chapter 6 (page 202).

Let me start by saying that I'm rather new to APEX (hence the reason I'm reading this book ;) ) and that I'm running APEX version 4.0.1.00.03 on an Oracle XE database. So yes, I realize this does not fully correspond with the 3.2 version this book was written for. But still, I imagine it shouldn't make that much difference. It's sometimes a bit annoying as the layout slightly changed, but nothing insurmountable.

However, I'm having problems creating the Form on a Table with Report option. When I follow the steps as described in the book (which correspond with another tutorial I found on the Oracle website), I can select the BLOB field in both the form and report, but after creating the pages, the image column is not present in the report page. While it's present in the form page, it doesn't seem to have any impact on the underlying table when adding an image. I manually changed the source select for the report page and added the image field. When I run the report, I don't get the page as shown on page 205, where the value for the product image is a "-". In my case it says [unsupported data type]. When I follow the steps described on page 207 and change the Format Mask I get an error "ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error: character to. So, I've to admit I kinda ran out of ideas.

Any suggestions would be more than welcome!

Thanks,

Erwin

Erwin:
I am nfamiliar with Oracle XE, however I do suggest that you try looking up how XE reads and displays images. Then take the information and convert one of the images to that particular format. Then use the image in the database and see how that works for you.

Keep me posted. Good luck!

peace95

__________________
Disclaimer: The above comments are solely the opinion of one person and not to be construed as a directive or an incentive to commit fraudulent acts.

peace95,

Thanks for your reply.

In response to your reply. Oracle XE (or Express Edition) basically is a full working Oracle 10.2.0.4 Standard Edition, with some limitations (see the following page for more information: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/da...iew/index.html ). This is Oracle's answer to free and opensource databases, which have become more popular over recent years (in part due to Oracle's high licensing costs. The same goes for MS SQLServer and DB2 BTW). I personally think it's the perfect solution for test environments, but also for relatively small production environments. Contrary to what some people believe, Oracle XE is a robust production database which has most of the features of it's big Standard Edition brother (not talking about EE of course).

So basically, what works in Oracle 10g, also works in XE. This means that BLOB's (as well as other Oracle datatypes) are fully supported and can be used to store images. I don't think the problem is on the database side. I don't seem to have any problems with BLOB's on the database side and can edit them without problems in a tool such as TOAD.

Maybe later, if I have some time, I'll run a test on a 10g database (don't really have a 11g database up and running at this time).

Erwin,

Change Report Definition to:
select "PRODUCT_ID",
"PRODUCT_NAME",
"PRODUCT_DESCRIPTION",
"PRODUCT_AVAIL",
"LIST_PRICE",
"CATEGORY_ID",
dbms_lob.getlength("PRODUCT_IMAGE") as "PRODUCT_IMAGE"
from "#OWNER#"."PRODUCTS"

Then continue with section 'Adding Image Display to a Report' in Chapter 6.

LowBat