Best way to rome?

Question

Hi,
I’m trying to display a detail page on a single record showing 99% of the columns as read-only and only 2 columns editable for the use. I’m running in to problems which I would like some thought on the best way to resolve them.
My first thought was simply create a page with page items of which 99% is display only and 2 text fields. This worked fine apart from 2 small details which are now causing me pain to resolve.
•     Display only with “save session state” set to “No” are great. Until the 2 editable fields cause a validation error. The error is displayed but all other page values are now lost since there is no session state, showing an almost empty page.
•     Display only with “save session state” set to “Yes” resolves this, but causes a new problem. Some of the display only fields contain numberic data presenting percentages. Which are stored as .75 for 75%. On the page I want to display these as 75%, which I accomplished through a post calculation to_char(:item*100)||’%’. Which worked fine as long as session state was NO, but now session state is retained it starts complaining that ‘75%’ is not a valid number.
What would be the best way to combat this. I tried thinking op several solutions, but I simply don’t know what would be the ‘apex’-way
•     Create hidden column based page items for all columns in need of formatting, create a 2nd page item display only item based on the hidden item value in which formatting is done.
•     Create column based page items only for the editable columns, show all other column in pl/sql regions, creating needed html from scratch
•     Create a page based on a procedure to process the editable columns, show all other data in pl/sql region
I can probably think of several more ways but they al seem so much work for such a simple problem.
I seems to me it shouldn't be so hard.
any hints are welcome!
apodictus

Answer 1

apodictus wrote:
Thanks for the hint!
That's basically the same as using a pl/sql region for all none editable as I opted.
Report region isn't really an option as I not only want to format the column, but also format their display position (as with page items)
For that matter a pl/sql region would give me that freedom to compose the html as I see fit.You can do this with a custom report template as well. I prefer to do that because it's cleaner to write separate declarative SQL and HTML than PL/SQL with lots of ugly concatenation or the prehistoric HTF/HTP packages.
(Almost the actual Dutch idiom is 'All roads/many roads lead to Rome', mine is the derived question which to road to choose. But indeed the point I'm was trying to make is the same as skinning a cat. I know I can easily resolve the problem. I'm just wondering what's the best/easiest approach.Sometimes that's as bad as having no solution at all.