How to display data in interactive report column without colons (:)

Question

Dear Apex gurus,
I'm a newbie and have just created an Apex application from a spreadsheet. I've created a named list of values and used it in a checkbox against a field in the default page 3 Create form.
When I've selected multiple values in my check box in the form, the data in the interactive report appears as one line with colons separating the selected values like this: Dog:Cat:Bird
What I would like is to have the data appear in the interactive report column as a multi-line list like this:
Dog
Cat
Bird
I can work around this by modifying the SQL code in the Region Source of the Region Definition of the report (Default Page 1 interactive report) to replace the colons with <br>
SELECT replace("PETS_CHOSEN",':','<br>') "PETS_CHOSEN", FROM "MYAPP" Note: this doesn't format properly in the posting. I replace the colon with a html br
This works, but seems to be a hack to me. I am guessing that I've missed a simple option setting somewhere, but I can't find it.
The other problem with this solution is that when I export the report to Excel, what is exported is Dog<br>Cat<br>Bird, which is seems worse than colons.
Thanks,
- Morgan
Edited by: mnrussel on 16-Feb-2009 04:13

Answer 1

Hi Morgan,
I think you have at least two choices:
1 - Replace the colons with ', ' (comma and space) - sort of reasonable on screen and in an export
2 - Create a second page that has the same report but uses the "export: csv" template. Create a manual link to this page to replace the standard Export link. When such report pages are requested, they download immediately instead of displaying. You can, therefore, use commas in this one and &lt;br&gt; tags in the on-screen report version
Andy
ps - To display tags in a post, use &amp;lt; for &lt; and &amp;gt; for &gt;