Skip to main content

Prevent general row based search in an APEX Interactive Report

By
At my current project we use Interactive Reports heavily. But in some cases the underlying queries are rather complex and a query without any filter or with just a filter on all columns doesn't perform that well (understatement...). We already implemented a solution to prevent initial loading of the data by adding an additional criterium to the query ( :P400_SEARCH = 'Y' ). The default value of this hidden item is 'N' and on Page Load the value is set to 'Y', so the next search will be executed. But as said, this is good, but not good enough...

So this morning I was looking for a solution to "force" the user to enter a query on one of the columns - either through the "search bar column list" (the magnifier on the left side of the search field) or through the Actions > Filter menu. The first attempt was to use a Dynamic Action that fires on change of the search field, but that doesn't work when the user switches existing filters on or off. So I inspected the debug output of the page and discovered an item named "APXWS_EXPR_1". This item is set when the report is refreshed and contains the value of the first column filter you apply. Subsequently you can have APXWS_EXPR_2 etc. So I added an additional restriction to the query: 

:APXWS_EXPR_1 IS NOT NULL

Thus by just adding one line to the query the user is forced to use at least one column filter - both the "contains" as any other more specific filter works. And I can even delete the previous solution that prevented running the query (actually the query is run, but returns "no data found" in no time) when the user navigates to the page.

As a side note, if you use the general filter on all columns, that value is available on the server as "APXWS_SEARCH_STRING_1" (and _2 etc.)


WARNING: 
THIS DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE IN APEX 18.x

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fix Interactive Report headers issue when using a Region Display Selector

By
When you have multiple Interactive Reports (IR) on your page and use a Region Display Selector to mimic tabs, you might notice some weird behaviour in the IR headings if you switch tabs. The headings are not positioned correctly and you get an extra empty row under the headings. It just looks weird and ugly. But if you resize your browser window, it all looks fine again (until you switch to another tab..) So can we fix this by creating a Dynamic Action that mimics that "browser window resize" event? Yes we can! Create a Dynamic Action that fires on Click of the jQuery selector li.apex-rds-item a . That should fire a JavaScript snippet :  apex.event.trigger(this.triggeringElement, "apexwindowresized"); So now a click on a tab not only switches from one IR to another but also fires that event that will "autofix" the IR headers. A simple solution for an annoying problem. This applies to APEX 5.0, I assume it will be solved in 5.1.
Post a Comment
Read more

How to create neatly formatted Excel documents using PL/SQL?

By
If there is a requirement to produce output from an application into Excel, you would probably create a CSV (Comma Separated File) with the data and start Excel to show the data - at least that's what I did...until now. The drawback of this solution is that you could only produce data and no nice layout. But Excel is also capable of opening HTML-files and using this you could create Excel files with data and magnificent layout! Let me give an example: 1. Create a procedure to show the data in formatted in an HTML table. CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE display_emp_list IS v_emp_count NUMBER(5); v_empno NUMBER(8); v_ename VARCHAR2(50); v_job emp.job%TYPE; v_sal emp.sal%TYPE; v_bg_color VARCHAR2(10) := ''; CURSOR c_emp IS SELECT empno, initcap(ename), job, sal FROM emp ORDER BY ename; BEGIN SELECT COUNT(*) INTO v_emp_count FROM emp; owa_util.mime_header('application/ms-excel', FALSE); htp.p('Content...
21 comments
Read more

Refresh selected row(s) in an Interactive Grid

By
In my previous post I blogged about pushing changed rows from the dabatase into an Interactive Grid . The use case I'll cover right here is probably more common - and therefore more useful! Until we had the IG, we showed the data in a report (Interactive or Classic). Changes to the data where made by popping up a form page, making changes, saving and refreshing the report upon closing the dialog. Or by clicking an icon / button / link in your report that makes some changes to the data (like changing a status) and ... refresh the report.  That all works fine, but the downsides are: The whole dataset is returned from the server to the client - again and again. And if your pagination size is large, that does lead to more and more network traffic, more interpretation by the browser and more waiting time for the end user. The "current record" might be out of focus after the refresh, especially by larger pagination sizes, as the first rows will be shown. Or (even wors...
Post a Comment
Read more