Creating process for multiple Date fields for update or insert in APEX

Question

hello there,
could someone please help me?
i have a form on Apex based on view that is based on three tables and updating and inserting ok using trigger instead of.
i have a problem now as in my form i have around 75 fileds (items) incuding 30 or more date fields which could be populated or left blank or update later.
so for each date field i have two boxs; one for date, input as dd/mm/yyyy (text field) and second for time, input as 23:45. All dates will be insert or update manually by user. so as i mentioned not all date fields could be poulated at one stage.
so i have created some process and validations and all of them work fine but i came accross if date left blank then (:) giving me problem so i have done following further process for each date field. In real table all the date fields have data type date.
declare
v_my_var date; -- for first date field
str_dy VARCHAR2(10);
dt_indx date;
str_tm VARCHAR2(20);
tm_indx date;
begin
str_dy := :p4_first_date
str_tm := str_dy||' '||substr(:p8_first_date_hh,1,2)||':'||substr(:p8_first_date_HH,4,2);
dt_indx := to_date(str_tm,'DD/MM/YYYY HH24:MI');
IF str_dy is not null then
v_my_var :=dt_indx;
ELSE
v_my_var := NULL;
END IF;
update table 1 set my_date = v_my_var where d_id= :p4_d_id;
end;
above code work fine but one date field of course therefore i have to do same code for each date field with changes and initialise variable again and again for each field.
so i like to ask is there any easy way that is more professional. i was thinking about the procedure and using collection or similar but honestly not much experience on that so could some one please help me?
I will be very thankful.
KRgds

Answer 1

Hi,
You can do the needful by re-using the code if you can give the item names as P8_DATE1, P8_DATE_hh1, P8_DATE2, P8_DATEhh2 etc..So your item name just differs by a sequence.
Now you write function which will return desired date value taking above items as input. Pass item names to this function, get session state using APEX_UTIL.GET_SESSION_STATE('item_name') API.
Now modify you code as
FOR i IN 1..30
LOOP
v_date_array[i] = f_get_date('P8_DATE'||i, 'P8_DATEhh'||i);
END LOOP;
....Now you have all date valus in array. Just write one update as follows
UPDATE  TABLE1
SET date1 = my_date_array[1], date2 = my_date_array[2]..
WHERE ....Hope it helps :)
Cheers,
Hari