Conditional Link on Interactive Report

Question

I'm trying to make the link column conditional on an interactive report. That is, I only want the pencil icon on the rows which have a field that is greater than 30. So, assume my query says:
select DEPT_ID, USER_LEVEL
from my_table;
I only want the link icon to appear on rows that have USER_LEVEL > 30. I tried (unsuccessfully) to get this to work by adding a condition of "Expression1 = Expression2", and I used the #USER_LEVEL# substitution string. (Note: I know this would be exactly what I want because I want the condition to be on all values > 30, but I couldn't even get this to work when I put #USER_LEVEL# in Expression1 and "30" in Expression2 and looked at the records that had a USER_LEVEL value of exactly 30).
In the end, I had to create a much more complex query like this...
select
case
when USER_LEVEL >= 30 then
'<a href="f?p=&APP_ID.:21:&SESSION.::&DEBUG.::P2_DEPT_ID:' || DEPT_ID || "><img src="#IMAGE_PREFIX#menu/pencil16x16.gif" alt="Edit" /></a>'
else ' '
end as edit_icon,
DEPT_ID, USER_LEVEL
from my_table;
This doesn't seem right to me. Can someone confirm that I'm doing this the right way?

Answer 1

Hi -
It really bugs me this forum has such a problem with code examples, so for a while at least I posted quick example on Google:
[Conditional Column|http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dd2tkvv6_212dbzw2ftq]
Not to complicate too much, but if you wanted to not have empty column except one row, you could of course apply this trick to the column that actually holds the user name in your table... in other words, the user could click right on their own name to go to edit screen, but every other user name but theirs would not be a hyperlink. But that is as they say an exercise for the reader :)
Good luck.