Interactive Reports – HardLikeSoftware

The question of how to add checkboxes to interactive reports comes up often. Usually the problem is not getting the checkbox to display in a row but in how to do something useful with the checked state. There are many forum or blog posts on this topic but they all seem to be rather dated. Even when the general idea is still applicable they use outdated practices including:

Inline event handlers using onchange or onclick attributes. These should be dynamic actions.
HTML regions with script tags in them or script tags in the HTML Header page attribute. There are much better ways to get JavaScript on a page now. Consider JavaScript File URLs, Function and Global Variable Declaration, and Execute when Page Loads attributes as well as dynamic actions.
Making ajax requests using the htmldb_Get API. This should be replaced with dynamic actions or apex.server.process API calls.

So I thought I would take a stab at solving this problem.

8 Comments

The improvement to Interactive Reports in APEX 5.0 has gotten mixed responses. Many people are very happy with the improvements, which include: multiple interactive reports per page, fixed headings, improved looks, improved usability, improved markup, and new features such as pivot.

However, people that had previously customized their apps by leveraging internal unsupported functions of Interactive Reports are lamenting the loss of the gReport variable that enabled those customizations.

The improvements in 5.0 and any future improvements necessitated restructuring the code to isolate the internal details. What was left out is an API to the useful features that people had discovered and shared. As Anthony mentioned on the OTN forums this is something that we hope to rectify in the future. The rest of this article is for the curious and impatient.

1 Comment

Tag: Interactive Reports

APEX Interactive Report Checkbox Row Selection

APEX 5.0 Interactive Report Customization