I have a REST data source for genres of a given movie, but how can I store those in a local table?

Sean Montgomery

I want to do this so I can filter movies by genre. As an extension of the APEX Movie Catalog tutorial, I created a REST data source for retrieving the genres from the Movie Database movie detail JSON payload, and I can output the genres onto the Movie Details page, but if the user adds a movie to their watch list, how can I store the genres in my movies_x_genres table?

I keep believing I can do something like write the rows of #APEX$SOURCE_DATA# to my table, but I have not figure out quite how to do that.

This seems like something people would need to do, basically query a web service (like TheMovieDB.org) and store the multiple records that are returned within the JSON payload, but I have not found a solution yet and have not created a working solution yet, either. I'd love to hear if others have done something similar.

jariola

Depend APEX version you use, check if REST Data Source Synchronization is what you looking for

https://blogs.oracle.com/apex/post/synchronize-data-from-rest-services-to-local-table-with-no-code-at-all

Sean Montgomery

Thanks, Jariola, for the suggestion. I am on the latest APEX, so I can certainly enable synchronization, but the problem is that my REST Data Source is based on .genres (array within the movie JSON), so when that REST Data Source retrieves, I can get genre ID and genre name, but I can't also collect the movie ID. The movie ID has to be a parameter for the REST data source, and I need it to be the primary key for the local table.

So whereas this MIGHT work if I knew how to include the value of the REST data source parameter from the page (i.e. P3_ID) in the REST data source output, I don't seem to be able to include :P3_ID in the output. Also, I don't see how to fire the REST data source sync from a form.

I completed the entire tutorial for the Movie Catalog, and all I want to do is query the genres out of the JSON that the Movie Details page already has available and write them to a table movies_x_genres. I feel like this is an application dev 101 operation, but I don't know how to reference the JSON genres array from the form that is already accessing the JSON but at the movie level (rather than the genres array).

I don't even know if I am making sense.