How to apply an accent-insensitive search to an interactive report?

Question

Hello all!
I'm trying to put an accent-insensitive search on an interactive report here. For example, if I'm on the page that has the interactive report and if I click the column header of the interactive report, I get to see a search bar that dynamically shows the results that match your input. Now, when I enter "jager", I want to see *"Jägermeister"* as a search result. The search must be accent-insensitive, so that I don't have to enter the ä every time.
My code is as follows:
SELECT name
FROM food_1
WHERE name LIKE 'Jagerme%'
AND NLSSORT(name) IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY NLSSORT(name, 'NLS_SORT=GENERIC_M_AI');As you can see, I first tried getting a result through the SQL Command. It should return the row that has "Jägermeister" as name. However, it doesn't. It tells me "No data found". So, how do I alter my NLSSORT to search accent-insensitive?
Some extra information, I edited the interactive report source to the following:
SELECT DISTINCT a.name, a.foodid
FROM food_1 a INNER JOIN foodunit_1 c
ON a.foodid = c.foodid
WHERE a.foodlanguageid = :P17_SET_LANGUAGE
AND NLSSORT(a.name) IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY NLSSORT(a.name, 'NLS_SORT=GENERIC_M_AI');I also tried doing ALTER SESSION before the SQL code, but it still gives me the same result: No data found.
I'm using APEX version 4.1.1.00.23.
Help and suggestions are more than welcome. ;)
Thanks in advance,
Magali

Answer 1

I found it out!
It's really ridiculous, actually.
Remember this code?
execute immediate ('ALTER session SET NLS_COMP=LINGUISTIC');
execute immediate ('ALTER session SET NLS_SORT=BINARY_AI');Well, this code is perfectly fine. Only, it doesn't execute. This is because it was misplaced...This process is not executed when you place it in the current authentication scheme, under the "Post-Authenticatoin Process" part.
You might wonder why this is, but I have the explanation to that.
You see, when you use an interactive report, the page processing isn't executed when you use the search function of that interactive report... Because it's an interactive report, I guess.
BUT.
An ALTER SESSION from the security attributes, that will execute.
So, the solution to my problem was, in this case:
Go to "Application" --> "Shared Objects" --> "Security Attributes" --> "Database Session" --> "Initialization PL/SQL code". In there, you need to put:
BEGIN
EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'ALTER session SET NLS_COMP=LINGUISTIC';
EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'ALTER session SET NLS_SORT=BINARY_AI';
END;By doing this, there's no longer any need to edit the source code of the report!
So, that's the solution. I can finally enter text without special characters in it, and get the corresponding data, with special characters... Ahh. :)
I hope this is helpful to others as well now. ;)