Adding an alpha picker to your interactive report

Question

The interactive report is realy a great great feature of Oracle Apex.
When working with a lot of data like cost centers names, organization names, person names, ect.
some users have requested if it isn't possible to have a convenience filter, so that they just have to click on a letter and they get filtered all the names that start with that letter (aka alpha picker) that look like this:
All A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
I was fascinated that such a feature is realy easy to implement as smooth integration with the interactive report features.
Just Create a region of type "PL/SQL" and paste the following into it and you are reday to filter by first letter:
declare
procedure put_filter(p_text varchar2)
is
   l_link varchar2(32000);
   l_url varchar2(32000);
   l_label varchar2(240);
begin
   l_label := p_text;
   if (p_text = 'ALL') then
     l_label := 'Alles';
     l_link := 'f?p=&APP_ID.:&APP_PAGE_ID.:&SESSION.:::RIR:::';
   else
     l_link := 'f?p=&APP_ID.:&APP_PAGE_ID.:&SESSION.:::RIR:IRLIKE_NAME:'||
     p_text||'%'||':';
   end if;
   l_link := UTL_URL.escape(l_link);
   l_url := '<a href="'||l_link||'">'||l_label||'</a>';
   htp.p(l_url);
end;
begin
put_filter('ALL');
for i in 65 .. 90 loop
  put_filter(chr(i));
end loop;
end;Hope that may help someone. Have fun, Willi

Answer 1

Hi Martin
I couldn't find a place where the filters are stored either - it would be nice to know.
It is possible to get to the filters via javascript as they are actually stored in a table with an id of "apexir_CONTROL_PANEL_COMPLETE". Within there, there are rows for each filter and each row has four cells. The second cell contains an A tag that has the filter itself as the text displayed as a hyperlink on screen. The third cell contains the checkbox that enables/disables the filter. Strings and numbers seem to be formatted ok, so you could pick up these values and create your own WHERE clause, populate a hidden field somewhere and then pick that up to generate a full select statement to get to the id's that you need.
I haven't yet tried this, so this is theory only - but I can't see that it wouldn't work
Andy