How to have rownum in a report based on a view

Question

How to use rownum in a report or tabular form?
I wanted to number the rows in a report. The most obvious way would be just stick
rownum in there. There is a view in a database1. It is merely select a,b,c from various
things joined together and order by pkey1.
Apex is in database2 so I have to create a view there across the link
like:
create or replace view SOME_VIEW as
select * from OTHER_VIEW@SOMELINK
alter view SOME_VIEW add constraint PK_SOME_VIEW
PRIMARY KEY (pkey1)
DISABLE NOVALIDATE;
The problem is if I try to include rownum in the query in the report I always get:
failed to parse SQL query:
ORA-01446: cannot select ROWID from, or sample, a view with DISTINCT, GROUP BY, etc.
There's no rowid, it knows that the primary key is Pkey1 so what is the problem?
I know it's rownum that it hates. Maybe I can just number these things some other
way. However it'd be good to figure out what it is griping about.
Anyone know?
Edited by: lake on Mar 12, 2011 9:36 AM

Answer 1

thanks!
Actually I made a mistake in testing. And it does work to do this:
in database1:
create or replace view VIEW1 as
select
rownum "SEQ", etc.
in database2:
create view VIEW2 as select * from VIEW1@mylink
How I screwed up testing that I don't know. I was calling the column NUM before....
this is good because you can create a report about the next so many of something, such as how many of
the next batch of mailings have address problems? For that you need to know in what order it will be done and
when to quit.
But I'm sure I will use the report rownum thing also. thanks very much.