Obtain and Process Clicked Cell Contents for Detail Fetch

Question

I have a report region on a page. It is a bit different from the usual report in that every* cell contains key data....Imagine a "Periodic Table of Elements" chart... it's analogous to that.
What I need to do sounds easy enough. I need to allow the user to click a column on the report region and then show the details behind the selected value (for example in a popup window). Normally, I would just do this by creating a link on the column. However, this situation is a bit different in that every* cell contains the key data from which to pull details.
Moreover, the data within each cell needs some parsing to obtain the key values. That is, the values are all glomed together in one big string (with HTML formatting) and need to be extracted before using them to set page item values on the detail page.
Is it possible to trap the text from the clicked cell in a report table (with a Dynamic Action perhaps)? If I could trap it, I could parse it in the javascript.
Thanks,
-Joe

Answer 1

Actually, I thought of a better way to do this.
I am going to manually add in anchor tags to the cells up front. This will allow me to make the anchor tags contain the parsed data that I need.
I am already accessing and setting some things in a Dynamic Action.
var tdCollection = document.getElementsByTagName("td");
for (var i=0; i<tdCollection.length; i++)
if ( tdCollection.getAttribute("headers") != null )
findMeText1 = tdCollection[i].getAttribute("headers");
findMeText2 = findMeText1.substr(0,3);
if ( findMeText2 == "COL" )
findMeText3 = $(tdCollection[i]).text();
findMeText4 = findMeText3.substr(findMeText3.indexOf( "|", 0 ) + 1);
$(tdCollection[i]).parent().children("td[headers='" + tdCollection[i].getAttribute("headers") + "']").css({"background-color":"rgb(" + findMeText4 + ")"});
I am already accessing all of the report columns anyway to set the background color. So, in this same loop, I can create an anchor tag. (Hopefully).