how to put more than 1 record in an oracle apex form?

Question

I have a problem with oracle apex forms.

The problem is that I want to add more than 1 record at the same time in 1 form. I have already read that the best way to do that is to use an csv file but then there is no tutorial to do that.

Answer 1

Oracle is a database, and combining files with databases is always tricky and not extensively supported for obvious reasons. Storing files and presenting them for download is one thing. Getting an Oracle database to open a file and reading and processing the contents is another. It sure it possible, but especially combining this with an Apex application I think you are going to run into a lot of challenges such as security restrictions.

However, stepping away from files does not necessarily mean stepping away from CSV. You could simply offer a large text input on your page in which a user can copy-paste a large CSV string. This can then be submitted and processed by the database. To do this you would probably need to create a process that gets fired after you submit the page. From this process you can parse the CSV data and insert multiple rows in a table. The same can be done for things like XML or JSON.

However, who is generating this CSV? Requiring a user to construct CSV is not very user-friendly. It can be complicated and error prone. If the CSV is generated by another application, isn't there a way to circumvent Apex and pass the CSV to the database directly?

If a single text-based data carrier is not required, which I doubt reading your descriptions, why not simply keep your form but allow the user to submit multiple forms? Would if be sufficient to insert one record per submit, and later using a batch to query these records and start formatting one at a time?

If you simply want the user to be able to enter multiple machines without having to submit the page for each machine, this is also possible, but you will have to leave some standard Apex functionality behind and implement some more custom javascript and PL/SQL functionality. Apex only allows a static amount of page items, which needs to be defined design time. So if you want to dynamically add fields such as text boxes and select lists to your page, you will have to resort to javascript. You could start by defining a region which renders one row of input fields at page load, and create a link under it saying 'add another row', which will render a new row of input fields under the existing one, and repeat this as many times as the user needs to. That takes care of the UI. Now when the user has entered all the data he wants, we need to submit all this data and get it into the database. So yes, at this point we would probably have to get all this data from the input fields and turn it into one single string. This would all have to be done client side in your javascript code. You can then use the Apex page item API to assign this generated string to a single page item, using the $x(...) or $v(...) functions. Then submit the page, at which point the page processes will be fired. You then define a page process which will parse the data in your page item, and use that data to insert multiple rows in the database.