Skip to main content

Implementing a Current Record Indicator in your APEX Reports

By
Developers with an Oracle Forms background might still remember this nice feature: If you click on a row in an Oracle Form "report" then it can be highlighted - either the full row or just a small first item of the row. The main difference with the Oracle Forms "reports" and the APEX Reports is that in Forms a "report" is usually comparable to an APEX Tabular Form. But a similar feature is frequently asked for - especially at customer sites that are transforming from Forms to APEX.

With a few lines of code we can make these customers happy .... Let's get started.

First of all your query should contain one column (as "Plain Text") that describes the Primary Key - that might even be a concatenated set of columns. Now we have to tell APEX that this is the column that contains our PK. For a Standard Report just add the CSS class "rowlink" to the column (without the quotes) . For an Interactive Report we need to use the HTML Expression:
 <span class=”rowlink”>#PK-Column#</span>. 
Of course you have to replace "PK-Column" with the alias of the Primary Key column in your query. This column will be hidden when running the page so if you don want to see it, you have to name that column twice in your query.
That's the only thing you have to do for every report with a "Highlight Current Record" feature.

The wizardry will be implemented on Page 0 / Global Page. First of all add a hidden item P0_CURRENT_RECORD. Set these properties: Value Protected = No,  Source = Null (always).
Next, create a Dynamic Action that fires After Refresh of this JavaScript Expression:
$(".rowlink").closest("div.t-Region, div.t-IRR-region")
This expression returns the div (either Standard Report or Interactive Report) that contains a "rowlink").
And the Action is, execute this piece of JavaScript:

//Remove the alternating rows and row highlighting from the report
$('.t-Report--altRowsDefault, .t-Report--rowHighlight', this.triggeringElement).removeClass('t-Report--altRowsDefault t-Report--rowHighlight');

//Hide the rowlink column and header
var header = $(".rowlink").closest('td').hide().attr('headers');
$('#'+header).hide();

// For each "rowlink" item
$(".rowlink").each( function(i,key){
  // Define a click handler for the TR that contains a   
  $(this).closest('tr').on("click", function(){ 
    $(".highlight").removeClass("highlight");
    $(this).addClass("highlight");
    $s('P0_CURRENT_RECORD', $(key).text());
  });
  // Create a data-id attribute for each rowlink  
  $(this).attr("data-id", $(key).text())  
});

// Add a "clickable" class to the TR -- not for this feature, see next blog post
$('.rowlink').closest('tr').addClass('clickable');

if ( !( $v("P0_CURRENT_RECORD") ) ) {
  // Issue a dummmy click on the first row
  $(".rowlink:first").closest("tr").click();
}
else {
  // Issue a dummmy click on the row containing the current PK
  $(".rowlink[data-id='"+ $v("P0_CURRENT_RECORD") +"']").closest("tr").click();    
}
Finally we need some CSS to actually see the highlighting in action - showing the current record with a light blue background that even changes slightly from color when hovering over it:
.t-Report tr.clickable { 
  cursor : pointer; 
}

.a-IRR-table tr td, 
.t-Report tr td {
  background-color: transparent;
}

.a-IRR-table tr.highlight,
.t-Report tr.highlight {
  background-color : lightblue;  
}

.a-IRR-table tr.highlight:hover td,
.t-Report tr.highlight:hover td{
  background-color: lightsteelblue;  
}

This code seems to work fine in most situations. There is an issue if you use something else than the Heading : "Fixed to None" property for an Interactive Report. And there might be a challenge when your page contains multiple reports.... but consider that as homework ;-)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Filtering in the APEX Interactive Grid

By
Remember Oracle Forms? One of the nice features of Forms was the use of GLOBAL items. More or less comparable to Application Items in APEX. These GLOBALS where often used to pre-query data. For example you queried Employee 200 in Form A, then opened Form B and on opening that Form the Employee field is filled with that (GLOBAL) value of 200 and the query was executed. So without additional keys strokes or entering data, when switching to another Form a user would immediately see the data in the same context. And they loved that. In APEX you can create a similar experience using Application Items (or an Item on the Global Page) for Classic Reports (by setting a Default Value to a Search Item) and Interactive Reports (using the  APEX_IR.ADD_FILTER  procedure). But what about the Interactive Grid? There is no APEX_IG package ... so the first thing we have to figure out is how can we set a filter programmatically? Start with creating an Interactive Grid based upon the good old Employ
1 comment
Read more

apex_application.g_f0x array processing in Oracle 12

By
If you created your own "updatable reports" or your custom version of tabular forms in Oracle Application Express, you'll end up with a query that looks similar to this one: then you disable the " Escape special characters " property and the result is an updatable multirecord form. That was easy, right? But now we need to process the changes in the Ename column when the form is submitted, but only if the checkbox is checked. All the columns are submitted as separated arrays, named apex_application.g_f0x - where the "x" is the value of the "p_idx" parameter you specified in the apex_item calls. So we have apex_application.g_f01, g_f02 and g_f03. But then you discover APEX has the oddity that the "checkbox" array only contains values for the checked rows. Thus if you just check "Jones", the length of g_f02 is 1 and it contains only the empno of Jones - while the other two arrays will contain all (14) rows. So for
Post a Comment
Read more

Stop using validations for checking constraints !

By
 If you run your APEX application - like a Form based on the EMP table - and test if you can change the value of Department to something else then the standard values of 10, 20, 30 or 40, you'll get a nice error message like this: But it isn't really nice, is it? So what do a lot of developers do? They create a validation (just) in order to show a nicer, better worded, error message like "This is not a valid department".  And what you then just did is writing code twice : Once in the database as a (foreign key) check constraint and once as a sql statement in your validation. And we all know : writing code twice is usually not a good idea - and executing the same query twice is not enhancing your performance! So how can we transform that ugly error message into something nice? By combining two APEX features: the Error Handling Function and the Text Messages! Start with copying the example of an Error Handling Function from the APEX documentation. Create this function
Post a Comment
Read more