Oracle APEX Plug-in to retrieve GPS location

Your smartphone is aware where it is using its GPS capabilities. From HTML it is possible to retrieve this GPS location. For this you will have to write some JavaScript.
The new Store location plug-in relieves you from writing the Javascript code. Use it by:

• downloading the plug-in from apex.world
• importing the plug-in into your application
• create two items on a page for the GPS coodinates (lattitude and longitude). They may be hidden items
• creating a Page Load dynamic action on the page referencing the plug-in in the action
• filling in the names of the GPS coordinate items in the plug-in attributes

That's all! Run your page on a smart phone and the items will be filled with the GPS coordinates of your current position. For security reasons the smartphone might ask you for permission to access the GPS sensor. 

Acting upon the GPS location

Retrieving the GPS location is an asynchonous process. That means that the process is started and at some later point in time the result is stored in the items. This means that adding another in the Page Load dynamic action will access empty GPS location items because the process is not finished. 

To act upon the coordinates you need to define a custom dynamic action with the following specification:

In the actions you can for example define a PL/SQL action with the GPS coordinate items as inputs. 

In this blogpost you find a full example for applying the plug-in. 

Happy APEXing