Help on querying data that contains special characters (#, &, @).

Question

Hi there,
I am using forms 6i to query on a table whose primary key starts with a # (pound or hash sign). If I do the query trough sqlplus it comes back fine, but if I do trough forms 6i it gives me the following error messages: FRM-40831: Value too long for the field and then ORA-00920: Invalid relation operator.
Well I have followed the instructions on the note 1007499.6 published by metalink. They explaind that when in insert the # into a field forms is thinking that you are actually going to insert a relation operator like WHERE, BETWEEN and etc. So query that is run is somewhere like this:
select rowid
from emp
where (dname research)
In that case dname would be the field that start with the #.
They recommend as a workaround to write a pre-query trigger on the detail block to substr the # and add it the # againg with substr of the rest of characters, on note 1064159.6 by metalink.
I have written one with no success, the trigger seems to never be fired the errors fire first.
Can anyone help with that one ???
Thanks
gleisson silva

Answer 1

Try below in the pre-query, would also need a none DB block and variable :blocka.keyv:
IF substr(:dname,1,1) IN ('#','&','@')
THEN
:blocka.keyv:= substr(:dname,1,1)||:dname;
:dname:=NULL;
Set_block_property('tablename',DEFAULT_WHERE,'dname=:blocka.keyv');
ELSE
Set_block_property('tablename',DEFAULT_WHERE,'');
END IF;