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Accessing an LOV with a function key (F9)

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In good old Oracle Forms you could access an LOV by pressing F9 (depending on your resource file settings). Within APEX you always need a mouseclick....unless you catch a keypress and call the LOV programatically. Of course with help of jQuery.

Create a function in your Page Header:

function checkLOV(pThis, pEvent){
  var keynum;
  var current = document.getElementsByName( pThis.name );
  if(window.event) // IE
    { keynum = pEvent.keyCode; }
  else if(pEvent.which) // Netscape/Firefox/Opera
    { keynum = pEvent.which; }
  if (keynum == 120) //F9
   //The LOV function call is in the anchor of the next TD element
  { eval($(pThis).parent().next().children().attr('href'));
  }
}
This function is called by an onkeydown event on the fields with an LOV: onkeydown="checkLOV(this,event)". Ofcourse you also use jQuery and the APEX Repository to set this event for all fields with an LOV definition...
You can see it live on apex.oracle.com.

Update: After a comment of Louis-Guillaume I changed the above code using the jQuery HotKeys plugin. The code gets a lot simpler:

$(function(){
   $('#P22_EMP').bind('keydown', 'f9', function(){
     eval($(this).parent().next().children().attr('href'));
   });
   $('#P22_DEPT').bind('keydown', 'f9', function(){
     eval($(this).parent().next().children().attr('href'));
   });
});
Also available on apex.oracle.com.
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Comments

Louis-Guillaume said…
Hey Roel,

You should take a look at Hotkeys, a jQuery plugin. You can bind a key event on a specific target (think about items/regions).

http://code.google.com/p/js-hotkeys/

Regards,
10:08 pm
Patrick Wolf said…
Hi Roel,

looks like we are both old Forms users, because I implemented a similar feature in my ApexLib framework to activate LOV and Date Picker popups. In my case it's Alt+Down.

A suggesting for your code, instead of using eval you may want to try jQuery().trigger('click') to fire the regular event handling for the icon.

@Louis: Thanks for the link to this plugin, I'm sure it will be helpful in the future!

Regards
Patrick
9:34 am
Roel said…
@LG
I tried hotkeys using
$('#P22_EMP').bind('keydown', 'f9', function(){ eval($(this).parent().next().children().attr('href'));
});
That works, but not only for F8, but for all keys....I guess I'm missing something....

@Patrick
Seems like using trigger('click') only works when there is a onclick event. In this case it is an image within an anchor.
1:08 pm
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