Apex Rocks

Two days ago, I knew very little about Apex (HTMLDB). I knew how to set it up and install it on the database side, but as far as developing something with it, forget it. There are other people using HTMLDB at my company and they have been getting good results with it. Since I didn't know that much about it, I kind of let them have free reign over things.

I am still supporting some reports that I did as a favor for a user a couple years ago. I don't mind since it's a real simple process, but the report relies on me running a query and dumping the results to a CSV file so I can send it to the user.

It's that time a year where I have to go through this process again and this year I decided to hand over the power to the user. From what I heard from other developers, it was a simple tool, so I gave myslef an extra week. I knew I could bang out hte CSV file in about 2 hours if I had to, so I basically had the whole week to work on it.

I started playing with Apex in the morning and in about four hours I had a basic report. In another day, I added some calendar pickers to let them enter a date range and some other dodads to give the user flexibility in how they wanted to filter the report. The best part was the "Spread Sheet" link that automatically downloads the report to a CSV file. Jeff - exit stage left.

I deployed it and gave the user the link in just under two days.

Apex Rocks!