Beginning Oracle® Application Express

2.2. Your First Page

Data design should always come first in your development process, since no amount of clever code can correct for an invalid or inefficient data design. For the purposes of the sample application you will be creating in this book, the four tables in the current data design are enough to get started creating your application. By the end of this short section, you will have moved from the concept illustrated in the data design to a highly functional application. You understand your data design, so you can start right in on creating your application.

2.2.1. Creating a Table

You have a high level data design. The first step towards a working application is the creation of a table. If you are creating an application to work on data that already exists in some form, you probably want to also populate the table with that existing data as soon as you create it.

APEX gives you several ways to quickly create and populate the tables that will be used in your application. In this chapter, you will use the following methods:

• Automatic table creation and population directly from a spreadsheet

• Manual creation of table structure and population from a spreadsheet

• Automatic creation of related tables from data in an existing table

There are other methods you can use to bring data into the Oracle database that works with APEX, including standard Oracle utilities for loading and unloading data, as well as other potential data sources, such as text or XML files. You can explore ...