Incorporating Content from Other Web Sites

Typically, pages in an application are based on data stored in an Oracle database. To incorporate content from other servers, you can create a region based on a URL to display content. For example, suppose you wanted to reference the current Oracle stock price. You could create a region of type URL based on a URL such as the following:

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

You could then create a 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)

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