You know how it is, when you have that feeling. You are on top of your game. You have a few quick brush strokes to add to a system to make it more dynamic. You have all the small needed changes in your head and you know it is just gonna work. You sit down for some quality time with your computer and with the application builder. It’s gonna be fun and you will get to bask in the glow of your success before the day is over. yup, that is the feeling I’m talking about.

Then there is that other feeling, then one we want to avoid. You know the kind. When you have an easy fix to do. It all goes well until it doesn’t. And then, nothing. You turn the knob this way, nothing. You turn the knob that way, nothing. You turn it up, you turn it down. No matter what. The same freaking result. And it is the wrong result. Time goes by, what was embarrassing after 15 minutes is annoyingly embarrassing after a couple of hours. Yes, that is the feeling I’m referring to.

Worst of all is of course when the first feeling turns into the second feeling. That is an afternoon that is sure to suck, and the more it sucks the more you get annoyed that you cannot see what is sure to be a very obvious mistake.

A day a few weeks ago I had this happen to me for the umpteenth time. Not with the same issue of course, but with one of those ridiculous things that just throws you out of your flow. What was a magical afternoon changed to one where I felt like a complete beginner.

It all started very innocent with me needing to add a table where I could store the location of different places a tab should point to. So I had an application item, I had a process that would populate it on new instances(sessions) and I had referenced that application item in the link target. The target returned was set to be “127.0.0.1:8080”. A target as good as any…

It didn’t show up in the link from the tab. It however was available so it could be displayed on a region on the same page. What the ….

Could it really be that APEX creates the HTML text for the tab before the application processes runs? It just doesn’t make sense, a test of hard coding the value to “abc” in the application process proved that it in fact ran before.

Could it be that a value passed in from the process was treated differently for tabs or application processes? I doubted it, but facing odd issues one tends to consider all kinds of illogical things. But hardcoding “abc” in the process once again showed that it came through to the tab.

What on earth. A friend tested the same page on his Mac and (fortunately?) got the same exact result. So it wasn’t my browser that was acting up.

Now we were really stretching and started looking at the page rendered in Safari and Firefox. What on earth, the link shows up just fine in them?

We’re considering a bug in APEX. I have read about things they have had to do to make IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera work well with APEX applications. Could there be a bug in there with how links with dynamic values were treated? It certainly was possible. If it wasn’t for the fact that some links showed up just fine, the “abc” one looked like a page on the same ip-address as the APEX server when looking at where Chrome wanted to send us. So it really wasn’t reasonable that APEX would have a bug related just to localhost addresses.

After some more coffee it dawned on me, maybe this wasn’t APEX at all. Maybe this was a “feature” of Chrome. After a peek in the source for the rendered page, the text “127.0.0.1:8080” was found in the link attribute for the tab. So APEX renders it like I expected, but Chrome didn’t honor it as a link.

It turns out that if there’s just text, then Chrome will assume it is a relative document located downstream from the DocumentRoot. However, if it is not a path that can be parsed as file system location, then Chrome will not allow the link to be used. What was needed was to put http:// in front of the address. That should of course be there to be a well formed URL. I just expected it to show up when hovering over the link anyway just as it does in other browsers.

It would be nice if Chrome rather than just linking to “blank” would link to a page somewhere that just said that it was a malformed URL. However, the solution took seconds to implement while the troubleshooting took WAY longer than it should have. Even worse two senior troubleshooters was stumped on this for a very long time.

So if you end up with an empty link in your APEX application, or any other web page for that matter, you know that it is most likely the result of having a malformed URL rendered in Chrome.

So yes I started of with the first feeling and feeling good about myself, quickly started the downward spiral of the second feeling. That day never really got back up to the first happy feeling again. Happy with having solved the issue, but not nearly feeling on top of my game when the day ended. Oh well, there will be more days to convince myself that I might be on top of my game (at least sometimes).