DIFM News & Events

The evolution of Precision Ag is here!

Apex Authentication & Authorization with Identity Cloud Service

Having visibility into who can access your application is critical in the application development process. Apex is built with the ability to create roles and permissions, but this video takes it one step further through the integration with Oracle Identity Cloud Service (IDCS). Users will be able to login to APEX applications with their own IDCS credentials based on an authentication scheme linked with IDCS. The access can be even more granular through group authorization schemes by only allowing certain IDCS users or groups to have visibility into distinct pages or data within your application.

Connecting Oracle APEX to IDCS

Integrating our APEX DIFM Ag Portal Application to Oracle IDCS is essential for managing all types of users, be they farmers, scientists, consultants or curious public internet traffic.  It also allows centralized management through the IDCS Administrators.  Users with proper access can spin up cloud resources on demand to accomplish scientific analysis.  

In all, this entire setup from start to finish should only take about 30 minutes or less. So let’s hit that timer and get started!

Using Oracle ODBC Drivers

Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) provides a standard interface that allows one application to access many different data sources. The application's source code does not have to be recompiled for each data source. A database driver links the application to a specific data source. A database driver is a dynamic-link library that an application can invoke on demand to gain access to a particular data source. Therefore, the application can access any data source for which a database driver exists.

Connecting To Private Autonomous Database Using OCI Bastion

Oracle recently released OCI Bastion, a fully-managed service providing secure and ephemeral access to private resources in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), all at no additional cost. One of the great capabilities of the Bastion service is its ability to connect to different types of resources in OCI, not just compute instances. This includes database PaaS services such as Autonomous Database. In this quick tip, I’m going to walk you through how to set this up, both for SQL connections, as well as to connect to APEX that comes pre-installed with all Oracle Autonomous Databases.

Setting Up Oracle ODBC & Client

Oracle Instant Client enables development and deployment of applications that connect to Oracle Database, either on-premise or in the Cloud. The Instant Client libraries provide the necessary network connectivity and advanced data features to make full use of Oracle Database. The libraries are used by the Oracle APIs of popular languages and environments including Python, Node.js, Go, PHP and Ruby, as well as providing access for Oracle Call Interface (OCI), Oracle C++ Call Interface (OCCI), JDBC OCI, ODBC and Pro*C applications. Tools included in Instant Client, such as SQL*Plus, SQL*Loader and Oracle Data Pump, provide quick and convenient data access.

GDAL documentation » Vector drivers » Oracle Spatial

This driver supports reading and writing data in Oracle Spatial (8.1.7 or later) Object-Relational format. The Oracle Spatial driver is not normally built into OGR, but may be built in on platforms where the Oracle client libraries are available.

APEX DOCUMENTATION

You can click here to access the online Oracle Apex Documentation for Application Developers.  

Oracle Spatial Online Reference Guide

The spatial features in Oracle Spatial and Graph consist of a set of object data types, type methods, and operators, functions, and procedures that use these types. A geometry is stored as an object, in a single row, in a column of type SDO_GEOMETRY. Spatial index creation and maintenance is done using basic DDL (CREATE, ALTER, DROP) and DML (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) statements.

Enabling Oracle JVM for Oracle Autonomous Database SDO_Geometry

Autonomous Database supports Oracle JVM. Oracle JVM is a standard, Java-compatible environment that runs any pure Java application.

Oracle JVM is compatible with the standard JLS and the JVM specifications. It supports the standard Java binary format and the standard Java APIs. In addition, Oracle Database adheres to standard Java language semantics, including dynamic class loading at run time.

Create Dynamic Drop Box Actions in Apex

This tutorial is for Oracle Apex Developers working on the Code-Innovate Project and reviews the process of creating dynamic drop down boxes useful for preserving the continuity of data in a process flow eminating from a database driven form. 

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March 07, 2023

Integration with Oracle IDCS Complete!

The DIFM Ag Research Portal and Farmers Portal is now integrated with Oracle IDCS and there is self-registration for farmers and research scientists.   Both applications remain under development but the underlying scaffolding is built and being tested.

Ag Research Portal:  Is an end-user application under development designed for PI's and Stakeholders to access, review, edit migrated data residing in DIFM's Autonomous Data Warehouse in the Oracle Cloud.  

Farm Portal: Is an end-user application allowing farmers to register for OFPE Trials, upload necessary data for implementing those trials.  

Integrating user registration with IDCS and managing application & data access with IDCS satisfies essential requirements of Phase I of the software development plan.