How to order a varchar2-field by click on a report column?

Question

Hello,
I have a report an a table. One varchar2-column (name of the column is VORGANGSKENNUNG) in this table stores data in this format:
xxx/yyyy where
xxx is a ID from 1 until e.g. 140 and
yyyy is the year (2007, 2006, 2005...).
The first entry in a year starts with 1. So the last entries could be:
3/2007
2/2007
1/2007
140/2006
139/2006
I a query I can sort this field like this:
order by
to_number(substr(VORGANGSKENNUNG,-4)) desc,
to_number(substr(VORGANGSKENNUNG,1,instr(VORGANGSKENNUNG,'/')-1)) desc;
With this query I can sort the report descent.
But the users want to sort this field by click on the column header descending or ascending.
How can I do this?
Regards,
Mark

Answer 1

Hi Mark,
One way may be to modify the region template, add an onclick event to the header, write an own javascript function that's creating the order statement and at the end, write this order statement back to an application or page item. At the end of the function I would do a submit, that refreshs the page.
Your report query must be modified, that it is picking up the order statement from the application / page item. So I use something like this.
DECLARE
str_express varchar(2000);
str_order varchar(2000);
BEGIN
str_express := 'SELECT col1, col2, col3
FROM my_tabl ';
str_order := :P230_ORDER;
str_express := str_express || ' ' || str_order;
RETURN str_express;
END;
Hope this helps,
chrissy