IF NEW VARIABLE IN SQL QUERY, DISPLAYS AS LAST COLUMN + rpad not working

Question

Hello everybody and thank you in advance,
1) if I add a new variable to my sql query to select a column which was already in the table, it shows it in the report table as the Last column to the right. That is, if I add "street" to
something like city, postcode, street, store, manager, etc, instead of placing street between postcode and store, it places it as i said as the last column to the right.
2) When values are entered into the cells of the tables, yes, they do expand it to their needed lenght, But, only if it is one word. If it is two, like when i enter the value "very good"
then it takes two lines so as with a carriage return within the cell, thus, making it too high the row. I tried to padd spaces with rpad but it did not work. something like rpad(stock, 20,' ')
I must say that the table is in the same page where there is a Form, so as the table grows in lenth it is actually squeezing the form located right on its left.
3) rpad did not work with the most simple syntax, but less would with what i need because it turns out i am using DECODE in order to do a conversion between value displayed and
value returned in my select list of values, something like : DECODE (TO_CHAR (stock),'1','Deficient','2','Average','3','Good','4','Very Good',null) AS stock,
so, i have tried to put the rpad there in several places but either it gave parsing error or it left the column empty not picking any values.
thank you very much
Alvaro

Answer 1

Alvaro
1) That is standard behaviour of apex builder. You can change the display order with the arrows in the report attributes column report.
2) You will have to play with the style attributes of the column to accomplice this. For instance style="white-space:pre;" in the Element Attributes of the column attributes. White-space:normal would thread several space (' ') as 1. So no matter how many you add with rpad they will be shown as 1.
Or set a width either as attibute or in a style class for that column.
Nicolette