At this point we can run the application by clicking on the Run Application icon to see the result of the design we carried out thus far. This opens up the report as shown in the next picture. At the very top is an annotation saying Anonymous User.

In this window we see the top part of this report. The report has been cut into a top half and a bottom half for display in this tutorial. The report title is "Employees." By default it shows 15 rows, but you can change it (10 to 5000). You can also carry out a search on this page.

For example, when the page is searched for "John,"  the result shown in the next screen pops up.  It looked for "John" everywhere and displayed what it found.

The default sorting was EmployeeID (see picture above), but clicking on the LastName column heading sorted the results for this column as shown in the next picture. Review the Last Name column and also observe the little UP arrow alongside the column name.

The screen in the next picture shows the bottom half of the Employees report screen. Here you can scroll the pages to show all the 107 rows, in pages of 15 rows each.

Clicking on the hyperlink SpreadSheet (bottom left) brings up the next screen where you can download  the report to a CSV spreadsheet, as shown in the next screen.

At the bottom-center of the screen shown above, there are several hyperlinks that allow you perform a number of report manipulations. These will not be discussed in this tutorial.

Summary

Oracle XE, with its streamlined application building process, makes it very easy  to create applications. This tutorial described the creation of a simple report, but it exposed the immense possibilities for designing and reusing the user interface in a consistent manner across applications. The generated report looks cool, can be sorted, searched, and exported very easily. With no fussy paging problems, and a smooth UI, it is an excellent RAD tool, totally integrated with the backend both for data and security.