Interactive Report and the mysterious invalid number

Question

Hello,
I have an application that is ready, or so I thought, to be sent to a client to update an existing application. One page in the application has an interactive report that is based on a table in the parsing schema that is joined to the apex_collections view. The report works without issue in my dev environment as well as in the client's test environment. But when a colleague tested the updated app in a different test environment, the report errors out with an ORA-01722: invalid number error.
Needless to say I'm now hesitant about the update to production because I can't find the cause of the issue on my colleague's machine and would hate for this to happen in production. In trying to find the issue in on my colleague's machine, I first tried removing all of the columns (save the id) from the report to see if it was being generated there, no change. Then I started removing the joins and when the join to the apex_collections view was removed the error disappeared. The join was written as:
SELECT *
FROM table tbl
JOIN apex_collections col
   ON tbl.id = col.c001
WHERE col.collection_name = 'MY_COLLECTION';I know that the underlying tables for the apex_collections view store columns c001 .. c050 as VARCHAR2(4000) so I was relying on implicit data conversion to apply the join. Perhaps this is where the error is coming from but that would mean that "extra" rows are being returned as all of the c001 values returned in the session (from dev toolbar) are also valid numbers. As I said before, the problem is only occurring in 1 of 3 apex instances so I tested it in a 4th, and again, there was NO problem. I then realized that my query is potentially dangerous if c001 is used to hold something other than a number in the current session, which is NOT the case in any of the instances, but I tried updating the report to the following to see if it would help:
SELECT *
FROM table tbl
JOIN (
   SELECT TO_NUMBER(c001) AS c001
   FROM apex_collections col
   WHERE collection_name = 'MY_COLLECTION'
) apex_col
   ON apex_col.c001 = tbl.idThat query worked as expected in the dev environment and will be used as the query going forward. However, it failed to fix the problem in the "problem" instance. This seems to be a local issue but I'd like to know for sure. All of the systems are configured as follows:
1. Dev - Oracle 10g R2 XE - ApEx 3.1.2 - Works
2. Test1 - Oracle 10g R2 EE - ApEx 3.1.2 - Works
3. Test2 (colleague) - Oracle 10g R2 XE - ApEx 3.1.2 - Fails
4. Test3 (my localhost) - Oracle 10g R2 XE - ApEx 3.1.2 - Works
5. Prod - Oracle 10g R2 EE - ApEx 3.1.2 - ???
Any ideas?
Regards,
Dan
http://danielmcghan.us
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tapigen

Answer 1

Dan,
I'm always suspicious of problems that disappear without knowing why - usually they reappear the very moment that an end-user starts using the app :D
You didn't show how you are populating the collection in your original posting, so I'm not clear on exactly what the data would show. What I was thinking was, knowing that collections are all varchar2's, that something like TO_CHAR() had been used in the SQL statement that created the collection.
I don't think that trimming the data would have any effect. If the problem does happen again, I would suggest creating a report based on the collection (basically doing a data dump onto a page) and then see exactly what is in there. If any number contains a comma (or other characters such as currency symbols), then you have to use a number format string to get back to the actual raw number.
Andy