Possible to "Fork" Maintenance Notice?

Question

Using the built-in APEX functionality on the Availability of the Application properties, we can either make the application unavailable except for developers or we can redirect to a particular page.
If we do the former, the user sees the sad, plain, uninformative "application currently unavailable" message. If we do the latter, the user can see the happier, "your site is down but, look at the cute puppy in the hard hat" page but, then, so do the developers.
What we'd really* like is for developers to be able to run pages, e.g. to test and fix mission critical bugs, but, to have non-developers redirected to the "cute puppy" page.
Is this possible? Any ideas, even general ones, would be most appreciated.
Thanks,
-Joe

Answer 1

Hi Joe,
in the book "Expert Oracle Application Express" ( http://www.apress.com/9781430235125 ) you can find an approach on page 421 detailing that.
This is what I have used in my projects so far, I have the most control over who can access the application for acceptance testing before releasing it into the "wild" to all the end users.
Sometimes you even want to have a few key customers validate the application before everybody else is allowed to access the new release, not just developers.
Thus we register a list of IP addresses that may access the application once we run in a so called RESTRICTED_MODE.
Here is an excerpt from the book:
BEGIN
  IF XLIB_CONF.GET_VALUE ('RESTRICTED_MODE') = '1' THEN
    IF IS_RUN_IN_BUILDER = FALSE AND INSTR (NVL (XLIB_CONF.GET_VALUE ('RESTRICTED_USERS'), '#'), OWA_UTIL.GET_CGI_ENV (‘REMOTE_ADDR’)) = 0 THEN
      HTP.P (XLIB_CONF.GET_VALUE ('RESTRICTED_MESSAGE'));
      HTP.P ( '<br /><span style="color:white;>"' || OWA_UTIL.GET_CGI_ENV (REMOTE_ADDR) || '</span>');
      APEX_APPLICATION.G_UNRECOVERABLE_ERROR := TRUE;
    END IF;
  END IF;
END;The function xlib_conf.get_value will return the current value of the configuration parameter (i.e..
RESTRICTED_MODE) from the configuration table.
Using the function is_run_in_builder (see Listing 9-13) you can determine whether the application
is run from within the application builder having developer privileges in the current workspace.
Listing 9-13. Function is_run_in_builder
FUNCTION is_run_in_builder
  RETURN BOOLEAN
IS
BEGIN
  return apex_application.g_edit_cookie_session_id is not null;
END;###
Hope that helps,
~Dietmar.