Manually Entering Primary Key.

Question

Hi,
I am in the very early stages of looking at creating Apex Forms/Reports to replace our existing systems on Oracle Forms.
In the existing database, there are huge numbers of tables that use manually enterable primary keys when creating the record.
These primary keys can be very simple, such as just a 6 character code field or 20 character reference field (made up of several different user enterable fields concatenated together) to multiple composiite primary keys, where there could be several levels of master/detail records.
I have looked in the forums for information on this but am struggling to find a way of being able to create records where the primary key can be typed in manually when inserting records and then getting the reports/forms to work. I do not need to update the primary key, just allow it to be entered.
It would just not be practical to create new sequences as primary keys for all our tables, just to get Apex to work how it wants - wouldn't this mean dropping the existig PK and creating a new one, then populating all records with the new sequence?
I need to be able to use tabular forms for multi row record inserts where the user can enter (but not modify) the PK - using a report/form to do this seems too long winded. I will also need to be able to do this in a form only, for inserting singular records.
Any help would be appreciated.
Regards,
Carl

Answer 1

you should set in your entity object the attribute as DBSequence and then create a before insert trigger in the db table to get the pk from a sequence or so, something like:
CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER trigger_name
BEFORE INSERT
ON table_name
FOR EACH ROW
begin
select seq_name.nextval into :new.pk_id from dual;
end;