question from my customer :
I am developing an application in Oracle Application Express and am working on unit tests for the PL/SQL stored procedures and packages that are stored in the underlying database and that are used by the APEX application. These unit tests should run within the SQL Developer Unit Test framework.
The problem is that some of the PL/SQL code stored in the database uses functions like NV('APPLICATION_ITEM') to access items in the apex application. These do not return any values when I try to execute the PL/SQL within the unit test framework, ie through the backend. While it is good that the NV function does not error, NULL do not really work well in my scenario either (for example when the result of this functions is inserted into a NOT NULL column of a table). I can think of a few workarounds, such as creating my own NV function inside the test schema to return desirable values, but nothing seems a really satisfactory solution. I just wonder if there is any best practice recommendation from Oracle for this scenario - how can I run code that uses APEX-specific functions through the back end. I could not find anything in the APEX documentation for this but I'd be interesting to know if there is any recommendation how to best deal with this case.
I am using SQL Developer version 4.0.0.13.80