This document describes building a flexible user-definable application with Oracle Application Express (ApEx) to provide political intelligence to campaigns. Key points: 1) The application allows customization by changing data instead of code, making it flexible. Data such as attributes, people, and properties can be customized. 2) It uses Google Maps and provides visual searches to find political contributors matching filters. Materialized views improve performance. 3) The application was created for a company called Independent Nation but is designed to be generic for any customer needing mapping capabilities. User-specific data, filters, and default settings allow customization for each user.

1. Building A User-Definable,
Flexible UI
with Oracle Application Express (ApEx)
By Bradley D. Brown, InteliVideo

2. Who am I?
• Bradley D. Brown • Today
http://bradleydbrown.blogspot.com • InteliVideo in April 2012
• Founder • Video Monetization Platform
• TUSC in 1988 • Built it to sell training online
• Sold to Rolta in 2008 • Focused on mid and long tail and
corporate deals
• IntelliReal in 2005
• ApEx provides a “quick turns”
• Sold to Equifax in 2011
approach to our offering
• 10+ other companies, boards • Founders Institute
• Professor – DU
• Advisor for Founders Institute
• Author – 6 technical books

3. My Interests
• Making a difference
• Helping people – teaching,
advising, …
• Building companies
• Using my talents with
technology
• The outdoors

4. Agenda
• User Definable
• Flexible UI
• Project / POC Goals
• Application Specifics
• Application Design
• Database Specifics
• ERD
• Tables
• Functions
• Materialized views

5. User Definable
• Data Driven • Trade-offs
• Drive code based on data • Performance
rather than hard coded
• “Readability” of code
• Examples
• Too many choices
• ES valuation model at
IntelliReal • Advantages
• Partners “turning off” partners • Quick Turns
on InteliVideo site
• Testing 100s of models,
• Flexible Database variable changes, etc. can all
be done programmatically
• Do you need the ability to add
(perfect value)
“columns” without “adding
columns?”

6. Flexible UI
• Data Driven • My bottom line
• What page to start at (after • If I’m doing the original
login) coding or I’m going to make
a change to my code and
• What partners to show
there is an assumption (i.e.
• Colors to display a hard coded number that I
might put into my code), I
• Easy with Apex stop and think
• Authorization rules • Should I add a column to a
table and should I change
• Display rules at all levels the code so it points at the
column?
• What level? Per user? Per
customer?

7. Independent Nation – POC Goals
• Dave read the book
• Called the author – Fipp (John
Avalon)
• Met with him and discussed the
concepts
• We met with numerous political
campaign target market experts
• I developed the software,
secured data,…
• We did demos to politicians,
target market people, etc.
• EC2 platform

8. Political Premise
• Politicians want to share their views with targeted groups of people who
are voting
• Key target groups (lobstermen, working moms, first time home owners)
• Identify and find those people
• Invite them to custom events (per group)
• Drive custom messages (reduced taxes for lobster, better day care options,
incentives for buying your first home) – email, text, phone
• Visit the networkers

9. Project / POC Goals
• Provide intelligence to political campaigns
• Build a GUI and GIS application (with ApEx)
• Application for Independent Nation, but wanted something we
could use for any customer with Google map needs
• Application that is dynamic and flexible
• Design and develop application that allows customization by
changing data, not code.
• Data about people, their properties or addresses they live at, and
other information about them – yet, stay open for others

10. Application Specifics
• Independent Nation is a company that specializes in provide
intelligence about voters to political campaigns
• Data sourcing - merged voter registration, voter contribution and
numerous other data sources as the starting data set
• Goal was to provide a flexible database design that will allow for
SIMPLE attribute additions without new coding. New data feeds
won’t require DB changes.

11. Application Design
• Developed for Independent Nation
• Every user
• Starts in a different part of the world
• Has their own color scheme and search criteria
• Uses Google Maps
• Could integrate other mapping solutions in
• Database
• Generic driving table with attributes
• Not many tables (i.e. simple design)
12

12. Political contributors in NJ
• Contributors by party contributed to…
13

13. Other Visual Searches
Age – Education, Income

14. Key Tables
• Application Data • User Driven Data
• Attribute • User
• Category • User Attribute
• People • User Attribute Color
• People Attribute • User Option
• Property • User Option User
• People Property

15. ERD

16. Attribute Table
• Attributes (fields) • Parent Attribute
• Short Description • Text 1,2
• Long Description • Data 1,2
• Category • Number 1,2

17. Category Table
• Categories of • Add a new category, assign
Windows/Tabs it to attribute(s) and it
shows up for all of the
• Category ID
people…
• Short Description
• Full Description
• Parent Category

18. People
• People
• ID
• First, Last Name
• Voter ID
• Property ID
• People Attribute
• People ID
• Attribute ID
• Start and End Date
• Source, Integrity
• Text, Number, Date Values

19. Properties and People
• Property
• ID
• Address
• Phone, Cell
• Valuation
• Lat and Long
• People Property
• People ID
• Property ID
• Start and End Date

20. User Specific Data
• User Attribute Color
• Colorization
• Limiting data
• User Option
• Saved Filters
• Descriptions, Include, Exclude
• Starting map location
• User Option User
• Users who share a filter
• Default filter

21. Functions
• Get_Desc • Get_People
• Gets the description for a • Brains for everything here
specific attribute for a
• Pipeline (or table-based)
specific user
function
• Get_Option
• Finds the people that live
• Gets the default filter for a within the lat/long range
user on the map, matching the
filters

22. Let’s Add a New Category
• Add the category
• Change attributes to be in the category
• Refresh the Materialized View
• Test it out in the UI

23. Let’s Create a New Filter
• Education of Too Youngs…
• Color by education level
• Include <18 year olds
• Exclude other age categories
• Save it

24. List of People Matching
• Uses the same service as the map
• Shows the details
• Can be exported

25. Search
• Person’s name
• Municipality
• Address
• District

26. Finds People
• Clicking View shows them on the map

27. Performance
• Created materialized • Faster Spatial
view Options
• PEOPLE_MV • Change from
lat/long to spatial
• Indexed search
column
columns
• sdo_geometry
• Turned on query re-
• Change query to
write
use sdo functions
• ALTER SESSION SET
query_rewrite_enabled=TRUE;
• Or…I could have just changed
queries (people_mv)

28. How the Maps Works
• AJAX • select * from
table(cast(get_people(:P6_SW
• var url = "f?p=&APP_ID.:6:' _LAT, :P6_NE_LAT,
|| v('app_session') || :P6_SW_LONG, :P6_NE_LONG,
'::::P6_SW_LAT,P6_SW_LO :P1_COLOR_ATTRIBUTE_ID,
NG,P6_NE_LAT,P6_NE_LO independent_authentication.g
NG,P6_ZOOM,P6_MAPTYP et_user_id(:APP_USER),:P1_IN
E:" + sw.lat() + "," + CLUDE_LIST,
sw.lng() + "," + ne.lat() + "," :P1_REMOVE_LIST,
+ ne.lng() + "," + zm + "," + :P1_SHOW_UNCOLORED,
mt; :P1_PEOPLE_ID,
• See Page 6 in my nvl(:P1_ROWS,1000)) as
people_Table))
application
• XML Report
• Cast function as if it’s a
table

29. Other Options
• Could use a Cloud provider • Yahoo Pipes requires data
in XML format
• Yahoo Pipes
• Can come from ApEx too
• Google App Engine
• iPerspective
• We put this in a hosted
environment
• Amazon EC2
• MaxApex

30. BTW – Political Reality
• Politicians don’t decide much of anything
• Their interns and experts do
• They don’t want to pay for anything
• They do know what groups they want to get to
• They cannot craft a message to them – for fear one
person will get the wrong message and spread it
• They want to deliver generic messages
• This killed Independent Nation in the end…

31. Getting Started, then Other Mapping I’ve Done
• Heat Maps
• GeoSearch
• Highlight and Visual Search
• Test Scores within a Radius
• Get Creative!

32. Google Map Integration
• Easy integration Starts At:
• http://www.google.com/apis/maps/
• Simple Pushpins:

33. Heat Maps
• A look at different neighborhood trends in home values

34. GeoSearch
• Grouping of properties
• Colorized and customizable

35. Highlight and Visual Search
• Highlight it
• Build your search, see it

36. Test Scores within a radius
• Visual results

37. Summary – Building a Flexible UI
• Flexible Database and UI – can overdue it
• Project / POC Goals – sales engine
• Application Specifics – functional
• Application Design - flexible reuse
• Demo for Customers – cool UI
• Database Specifics – data driven app

38. Questions?

39. Brad’s Papers and Presentations
• Java-based Oracle Web • Practical Portal Practices
Development • Implementing JSP in Portal
• Java Server Pages • UltraSearch
• JavaMail • Search Engines
• Java for the PL/SQL • Utl_smtp and Utl_http
Developer
• iFS
• Web Cache – achieving 150
the performance • JavaScript
• 9iAS Installation, • Top DBA scripts for Web
Configuration, and Tuning Developers
• Wireless • Security

40. Copyright Information
• Neither InteliVideo, Rolta TUSC nor the author guarantee this
document to be error-free. Please provide comments/questions
to brownb@tusc.com.
• InteliVideo, Rolta TUSC © 2012. This document cannot be
reproduced without expressed written consent from an officer of
Rolta or InteliVideo.