More/Less link to show & hide more text in a report

Question

Hi Everyone,
Lot of my reports having description field running around close to 100 to 200 characters.
So instead of showing all the description to the users why not show only partial data like first 100 characters and then followed with a "More..." link to show the rest and change the link to "...Les".
On clicking Less it should display only 100 characters.
Can some one please throw some light on how to embed this in a report column.
Thanks,
Teku.

Answer 1

Hi,
Lot of my reports having description field running around close to 100 to 200 characters.So instead of showing all the description to the users why not show only partial data like first 100 characters and then followed with a "More..." link to show the rest and change the link to "...Les".
On clicking Less it should display only 100 characters.
Can some one please throw some light on how to embed this in a report column.>
Tweak your report query
SELECT ...
'<div id="less_#ROWNUM#">'||substr(Long_column,1,100)||'<a ref="javascript:$x_Show(''more_#ROWNUM#'' );
    $x_Hide(''less_#ROWNUM#'');">more...</a></div><div id="more_#ROWNUM#" style="display:none;">'||
    Long_column||'<a ref="javascript:$x_Show(''less_#ROWNUM#'' );$x_Hide(''more_#ROWNUM#'' );">
    ...less</a></div>'  LongColumn
...FROM...Replace ref with href, I had to remove the leading h to post the code snippet.
Next create a function that accepts varchar2 as input and returns the HTML fragment as shown above, say do_more_less . In all your report queries call the function , e.g.
SELECT ... , do_more_less(Long_column) LongColumn, ...Cheers,