About Incorporating Content from Other Web Sites

14.5 About Incorporating Content from Other Web Sites

To incorporate content from other servers, you can create a region based on a URL to display content.

Typically, pages in an application are based on data stored in an Oracle database. For example, suppose you wanted to reference the current Oracle stock price. You could create a region of type URL based on a URL. For example:

http://quote.yahoo.com/q?d=b&s=ORCL

You could then create an item called STOCK_SYMBOL and base your region on a stock price entered by the user. For example:

http://quote.yahoo.com/q?d=b&s=&STOCK_SYMBOL.

Sometimes (as is the case with the previous example) the HTML returned to the region is more than is needed. To restrict the HTML displayed, you can use the following region attributes:

URL (discard until but not including this text)
URL (discard after and including this text)

Tip:

The previous example may require that you set the Proxy Server application attribute. If you do not set the Proxy Server application attribute, you get an error message. Oracle Application Express uses the Oracle utl_http.request_pieces function to obtain the HTML generated from the given URL. See "Editing the Application Definition."

Developers can also use the Region attribute Inclusion Mode to control how Oracle Application Express retrieves and displays the content. Options include:

IFrame - The browser displays the remote content in an HTML iframe. Oracle Application Express does not have to fetch this content into the database for display.
Inline (escape special characters) - Causes the database to load the remote content at page rendering time. It then displays the fetched data inline, at the position of the region. Special HTML characters in the content are escaped, to prevent cross site scripting.
Inline (no escaping) - This mode is similar to Inline (escape special characters) except the HTML characters are not escaped. Developers should only use this mode if the remote content is always safe.