Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Track the changes in your Apex application between releases: Yes you can Plsql based methodology to monitor the changes in your application between releases Koen Lostrie Developer, Curriculum Development Oracle Corporation March 25 th,

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Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Program Agenda Introduction Solution Architecture Implementation Demo Q & A

Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Introduction Good tracking system (team dev/ packaged app/ Jira) where developers document changes. Works really well for tracking features/enh req/bugs. NOT for knowing exactly what changed. Apex apps are easy to change. There is always the “ah here is a bug let me quickly fix that. No need to document that”. Audit columns in the apex views give us who and when but not what and old value/new value. How can we know what changed in our application

Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Introduction Check the export file – challenge. Big challenge. Compare the splitted export files – same. Version control comparison. So what doesn’t work ?

Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Introduction How else can we track changes ? – DBMS_COMPARISON. – Oracle Total Recall. – Other Tools (eg COMPARE_SYNC) But I would like to track changes in the apex views. – That is a view, can’t create a trigger on that So how about – replicating the apex view data and then auditing changes ? The idea...

Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Introduction Be available to all oracle customers (no EE functionality) Not needing any special system/sys access Be supported by Oracle – no messing with apex objects or apex schema Survive upgrades Be easy to maintain, debug, change I want my solution to...

Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Architecture Generate a table for every view we want to track Generate a trigger on each of those tables For every column that we want to track, log old/new value in case of change. Merge the view data into our tables and we’re flying ! What are the parts ?

Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Implementation Activities: Initialize data and Log incremental changes Transactions: Row level changes (I/U/D) Audit Logs: Column value changes Naming conventions

Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Implementation Create table as select * FROM were 1 = 2 Challenges: – Which views ? APEX_DICTIONARY – Fails for APEX_APPLICATION_LISTS with ORA-1723 – Some Bugs in APEX_DICTIONARY Solution: Create helper table CTA_VIEW_ATTRIBUTES The work. Step 1: Create Objects

Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Implementation Create trigger on each table INS/UPD/DELETE for each row. Trigger calls procedure to store old/new values if there is a change (asktom). Challenges: – Oh no ! PAGE_NAME seems to be everywhere ?? – Do I track all columns (even COMPONENT_SIGNATURE ?) – How do I uniquely define a row (some documented, some not documented, some not available and skipped) Solution: Create helper table CTA_VIEW_EXCL_COLUMNS to store columns to exclude for table and child table (based on apex_dictionary hierarchy) The work. Step 2: Create Objects

Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Implementation Copy the current application view data into our newly created tables. Disable triggers for this operation. Merge statement (see later) on unique key from CTA_VIEW_ATTRIBUTES The work. Step 3: Initialize Data

Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Implementation Merge the current apex view data into CTA tables (Merge + Delete) Challenges: – After a Log Changes operation, the data in our CTA tables is now identical what if more changes come up. Solution: restore old version and Initialize Data Better solution: parameter INCREMENT_VIEW_DATA. Use AUTONOMOUS TRANSACTION to store delta and roll back transaction. The work. Step 4: Log Changes

Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Implementation You learn how internals work and not everything is what it seems: – eg: do anything on IR and CT_APPLICATION_PAGE_IR_RPT gets updated – Eg: CT_APPLICATION_PAGES.PAGE_FUNCTION only set after builder is run Control characters trigger a change (this is not logged as change) Quirks, open issues and unexpected results

Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Implementation Can I copy from another app id ? Can I get my hands on this ? This is more than just a working prototype right ? And it is fully supported by Oracle ? Apex 5 (Yes, if...) ? Warning ! (hint... Security) I knew you were going to ask...

Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Demo

Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. | Questions ?