Interactive Reports - SQL Source Question

Question

Background
Apex 3.1 is installed on Oracle 10g instance on local machine but all data is stored on a remote machine on Oracle 9 & 10 instances.
This data is also used by another piece of software, which directly manipulates the data.
The Apex Application that I am developing is to be used as a Quick Find/KPI Reporting tool and is setup to utilise DBLinks and Synonyms.
Within the remote data, we have a mapping table that contains user specific alias' for field names, which the users set using the other piece of software. There can be up to 5 mappings per table field each defined as LNG01, LNG02,etc.
In order to provide the same field Alias' in the Apex application, I have created a PL/SQL function to return the field alias and return a string value containing the final SQL.
Problem
In standard reports, this would work correctly as you could return a SQL statement in a string and it handled it with no problems.
However, due to Interactive Reports not supporting this, I have tried to find code to pass in the string SQL Statement to return a TABLE or PIPELINED datasource.
The string SQL statement will vary for each time it is used so the string SQL statement is effectively built as dynamic SQL
This causes as problem as I will never be able to define the ROWTYPE for a type TABLE variable as the field names will not be constant.
Can you tell me if there is any way to create a SQL source that could be used for the Interactive Report based on dynamic SQL?
Alternatively, if you can provide any alternatives to finding a solution I would be most grateful.
Apologies if this question has been posted before.
Thanks in advance.
Stuart

Answer 1

Stuart,
You could:
1) Create page items, one for each dynamic column header (e.g. P1_OBJECT_NAME_HEADER, etc).
2) Create a page process, to run when the page is loaded, that populates each item with the appropriate text. This can pull the column header text from your remote source.
3) Use a static query as your interactive report source:
    select objname,
           objuniqueid,
           objtypecode,
           objsitearea,
           objdesc,
           objdesc2,
           objlocationid,
           objcommission
      from cdoweb_om4) Edit the interactive report attributes -- use APEX substitution string syntax to reference the item values (e.g. "&P1_OBJECT_NAME_HEADER." without the quotes) instead of static column headers.
For more information on using substitution strings:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E10513_01/doc/appdev.310/e10499/concept.htm#BEIFGFJF
- Marco