Low Code Development solutions provide a development environment that can be used to create applications via a a graphical user interface instead of manually coding everything. Those solutions provide tools to accelerate the development, with reusable components and a drag’n’drop style to compose those components.
In the Low Code world, Oracle has two solutions that stand out.
APEX – builds applications on top of database tables.
VBCS – builds applications on top of REST API’s.
There are several Labs/Tutorials out there for both products.
In this post I will show how to create an APEX application from a csv/excel in less than 15 minutes.
Open APEX
The pre-requisite here is that you have the ADB or APEX service provisioned.
The first time you login to APEX (remember, the admin credentials were provided while creating the instance) there are no Workspaces. Let’s create one. Login with the ADMIN credentials.
Create Workspace
When you login as an Admin, you should find the workspace menu and create a new one. It’s advisable to also create users, but I will keep using my admin user for all tasks in this post.
Once that is done, you can logout from the admin mode and login into the Workspace.
Load Data from a File
I got my data from https://www.kaggle.com/stefanoleone992/fifa-21-complete-player-dataset . Its a csv with football players data (this is data from the FIFA 21 game).
By default the File Encoding is not UTF-8 and that causes some problems in the players names. After changing it, all is correct.
Create the Application
All the items showed in the picture are by default. We can customize them now or at a later stage.
Run Application
And just like that, with minimum development effort, we can run the application. Granted that it’s all out of the box, and customization (or shall I say configuration 🙂 ) is required, but it’s really fast to get started.
Dashboards
The default dashboards are not as relevant as you can see…but this is what we get without explicitly configuring the fields for which the information would be useful. Lets have a closer look at the Nationality dashboard.
The cool thing about this is that it allows us to drill down into the graph. If I press Portugal, it shows me all the players with that Nationality.
Reports
This page gives us an Excel like type of navigation, but much better in terms of user experience.
There are plenty of filtering/sorting/formatting options.
When I filter by players with a shooting rating > 90 (keep in mind these are the ratings for the Console game 🙂 )
Administration
The administration page brings yet more capabilities.
These are not the default colors for the app – I changed this into Oracle Redwood Theme.
Here we can also check user activity, page performance and views and also error logs. Below a sample view of the Activity Dashboard that shows top users and most active pages. Something we can not get from managing data in an excel.
Conclusion
APEX is really powerful and it allows to create an application in no time. It’s the perfect solution to replace all those excel sheets being sent around and shared across multiple users. This post showed that in less than 15 minutes we can pick up an excel with data and create a stable application that manages the data and adds dashboards and reports on top of it. All of that comes with user/role management and audit trails