Passing values w/special characters in URL into an interactive report

Question

Hello,
I have a problem and Ive been all over these forums and reading/trying everything I can to get something to work. I have a page that has a field called Name Search. The field is a TextField with autocomplete type. If I select a company name that contains special characters, like 'Blue Shield of California Life *&* Health Insurance Company', when I click go button (using a branch), it is supposed to pass this value into the URL to populate IR_COMPANY_NAME on the interactive report page to create the report filter. However, when it goes to the IR page, it actually filters on 'Blue Shield of California Life *& amp;* Health Insurance Company' with 'amp;' instead of & and doesnt find any matches. In the page source it is actually 'value="Blue Shield of California Life *& amp; amp ;* Health Insurance Company." Here is the URL that it produces:
http://webtest2:7775/apex/f?p=102:IRCompanyList:995769774353901::NO:5,RIR:IR_COMPANY_NAME,P5_COMPANY_NAME:Blue%20Shield%20of%20California%20Life%20%26amp%3B%20Health%20Insurance%20Company,Blue%20Shield%20of%20California%20Life%20%26amp%3B%20Health%20Insurance%20Company
The interesting thing is that I have another page that has a clasic report that lists all compnaies by name and the company_name is a link that passes the company name into the exact same IR and it works fine. In the page source it is value="Blue Shield of California Life *&* Health Insurance Company" Here is the URL that this page produces:
http://webtest2:7775/apex/f?p=102:5:995769774353901::NO:4,RIR:IR_COMPANY_NAME,P5_COMPANY_NAME:Blue%20Shield%20of%20California%20Life%20%26%20Health%20Insurance%20Company,Blue%20Shield%20of%20California%20Life%20%26%20Health%20Insurance%20Company
I have modified every field involved changing between encoding, no encoding, changing display types (Standard Report Column, Remove HTML and escape special characters, etc). I have also attempted to encode the value myself prior to sending it to the next page. I have tried variations of the htf.escape_sc etc. I have also tried adding \&P2_COMPANY_NAME.\. I have also tried adding pl/sql to create a collection to store the values and then pl/sql to fill the values on the report page. It gives me the success message I setup, but it never actually fills the value.
I am also having problems with another field that has a comma in it. I will wait to address that one to see if I can fix this first with hopes that it can be resolved by whatever I do to fix this issue.
Any suggestions? I appreciate any feedback!
Jen
Edited by: J-Lig on Jul 13, 2012 10:20 AM
Edited by: J-Lig on Jul 13, 2012 10:21 AM

Answer 1

Thank you for your feedback!
Yes, I forgot to mention that. It does come from a table, but company_name is not unique in that table. Meaning, it wouldnt know which ID to pass. Perhaps I should seperate the name out into another table and then I could pass the id. I was just hoping to get this to work programatically since the links from classic reports actually work correctly. I am starting to think this is a bug. This issue appears to have been addressed to make the links from reports pass the & correctly, but not in the branching?
I have attempted to replace and then re-replace but I couldnt get it to work with IR_ fields as the filter fields are generated by the Interactive Report region. Do you have any insight working with those? Are there any tricks to it that I might be missing?