Bug in Classic Report based on Function?

Question

As a simple example, suppose I want a classic report in which I can change the sort field by selecting from the item P1_SORTFIELD. In Apex 4.2 I was able to implement the report using the PL/SQL function
return 'select ENAME, SAL from EMP order by ' || :P1_SORTFIELD;
I cannot do this in Apex 5 on my apex.oracle.com workspace. I either get an "SQL command not property ended" runtime error if I use generic column names, or "not all variables bound" parse error if I don't.
My real application uses generic column names, so I am most interested in a solution to that.  For example, I tried creating a report having the source
return 'select ENAME from EMP order by ENAME';
If I run it using generic column names I still get the "SQL Command not properly ended" runtime error.
Is this a bug??
Ed Sciore

Answer 1

Ed Sciore wrote:
As a simple example, suppose I want a classic report in which I can change the sort field by selecting from the item P1_SORTFIELD. In Apex 4.2 I was able to implement the report using the PL/SQL function
return 'select ENAME, SAL from EMP order by ' || :P1_SORTFIELD;
I cannot do this in Apex 5 on my apex.oracle.com workspace. I either get an "SQL command not property ended" runtime error if I use generic column names, or "not all variables bound" parse error if I don't.
My real application uses generic column names, so I am most interested in a solution to that.  For example, I tried creating a report having the source
return 'select ENAME from EMP order by ENAME';
If I run it using generic column names I still get the "SQL Command not properly ended" runtime error.
I cannot reproduce the same error messages in my workspace on apex.oracle.com.
The basic problem here is that the function body will not return a syntactically correct SQL query if the session state value of P1_SORTFIELD is not a valid sort expression for the query. This will always be the case when the region source is validated in the App Builder, and also if P1_SORTFIELD is null at runtime. The solution is to ensure that the function body always returns a valid query irrespective of the value of P1_SORTFIELD:
return 'select ENAME, SAL from EMP' || nullif(' order by ' || :p1_sortfield, ' order by ');
Here is another weird thing. I looked at my Apex 4.2 application that got transferred over to Apex 5. The region that does the dynamic sorting still works. But now I just created a new region on that page that has the same source, and as far as I can tell, exactly the same properties. And this region gives me the runtime error. The URL is apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=80034:33 if that helps.
Given that I can't reproduce your results based on the information provided, I think we'd need access to the app in your workspace in debug mode to investigate this fully.