Bill Murray on storytelling

Bill Murray on storytelling http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PresentationZen/~3/m3EdWKUgJsY/bill-murray-on-storytelling.html

Sleep

The Power of Sleep http://time.com/3326565/the-power-of-sleep/?pcd=hp-magmod

Can't get no Rest An Oracle RESTful Service Consumed by Excel

I recently needed to get information from an Oracle Data Base into excel.  For those of you who have ever had the same need, you know that installing the proper Oracle client software and configuring it is a bit of a process

In this case I installed the Oracle Client for the 11i database that I was using
I configured the TNS Names entry for connection to the database on a remote server
I configured a ODBC source which gave  a successful test of connectivity

After all of this excel gave me an error when I tried and connected to this data source

This error tells you that you may have a 32 bit office client with a 64 bit OS in this case Windows 7.  Guilty as charged.  Suffice it to say -there must be a better way.  After a Restful sleep (I bet you see where this is going) I decided to utilize the ability of APEX 4.1 to publish a portion of a report as a Restful web service.

There are a few steps to making this happen

First you need a report page with some data so, I loaded the demo app into APEX

I set the page (2- Customers) in this case that had the report public so that no sign in would be required

You need to go into the administrator role and allow rest services

After all of this sets up the next step which is to allow the report region to be published.  I will shift over to page 4 - Orders to show what happens when you get things out of order.

This will allow the page 4 to be set to public, given a region id and set to Restful publishing

This final step is to test the rest service in your favorite browser and load it into Excel

my link is 

http://192.168.0.120:8888/apex/apex_rest.getReport?app=100&page=4&reportid=ord

the app 100 was assigned to the demo app when I loaded it

The page 4 is the orders page in the demo

the report id is the static id ord that I assigned and demo in the above video

Hooray - there is now Oracle data in Excel!

Summary
We have published (provided) a rest service in Oracle APEX 4.1 and consumed from a browser and excel. A pretty good days work!



Many thanks to
http://oracleapexideas.blogspot.com/2011/12/restful-access-of-report-in-oracle-apex.html
for describing the url setup

You cam also check out the official APEX documentation below:

Controlling RESTful Access

Use the Allow RESTful Access attribute to control whether developers can expose report regions as RESTful services.

See Also:

"Implementing Web Services" in Oracle Application Express Application Builder User's Guide

To enable RESTful Access:

1. Log in to Oracle Application Express Administration Services. See "Logging In To Oracle Application Express Administration Services".
2. Click Manage Instance.
3. Under Instance Settings, click Security.
4. Locate the RESTful Access section.
5. From Allow RESTful Access, select one of the following:
• Yes - Enables developers to expose report regions as RESTful services.
• No - Prevents developers from exposing report regions as RESTful services.
6. Click Apply Changes.

From <http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23903_01/doc/doc.41/e21678/adm_mg_service_set.htm#AEADM298