Putting Java Applets in Cell in Report

Question

I am in a small biotech and am trying to put together a chemi-bioinformatics application with HTMLDB. I want to have chemical structures (2D & 3D) show up in reports in the same row with the data associated with that chemical (e.g. properties, assay results, etc.)
I have found several Java applets that work well. These are uploaded along with the chemical structure files (as static files)and referenced using #WORKSPACE_IMAGES# in the path in the HTML/Javascript.
What I would like to do is to have the structural info (essentially it is formated alphanumeric text) in a table linked to the appropriate chemical id and associated data.
This will be displayed as a report with the first cell of each row containing the applet (with a reference to read in the structural info cell on the same row).
How can I embed the applet into the first cell of each row on the report?
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated!
-Dave Hecht

Answer 1

our oracle support analyst was checking around internally re your issue, and tipped your hand a little by saying you're trying to have your #MOLFILE# column render as a textarea. as you've probably found, those "Updateable Column Attributes" are ignored when you specify an HTML Expression. since you would still like to have your data render as updatable while applying some of that html expression formatting, consider manually making your #MOLFILE# column updatable. if you do that, you'd have 100% control over the id values that you're having issues with. so if you had a report query like...
select molfile from my_table
...and you indicated that you wanted molfile to render as a textarea, you'd find the generated html for each row to look something like this...
<textarea name="f01" rows="15" cols="15" wrap="VIRTUAL" id="f01_000N">some molfile data here</textarea></td>
...where N is the associated #ROWNUM#. so if you're having a hard time referencing your values after rownum=9, as i'm gathering, you could consider manually naming your cells (though there's probably a more proper/fancy way to dynamically reference those higher rownum values, i just haven't looked for one). to do so you could turn off the "Updateable Column Attributes" by setting the "Display As" field in that region to "Display as Text (does not save state)". then drop something like...
<textarea name="f01" rows="15" cols="15" wrap="VIRTUAL" id="f01_#ROWNUM#">#MOLFILE#</textarea></td>
...into the "HTML Expression" field for your molfile column. the part of this syntax that needs to conform to htmldb standards is the "name" value. this is somewhat explained in our tabular form how-to doc at...
http://otn.oracle.com/products/database/htmldb/howtos/tabular_form.html#MANUAL
...but the form elements with names f01, f02, f03, etc will be accessible during the htmldb engine's accept processing via those pl/sql varchar arrays, htmldb_application.g_f01, htmldb_application.g_f02, htmldb_application.g_f03, etc. if you're using an htmldb wizard-generated tabular form instead of one you're creating yourself, just make sure your HTML Expression code provides the same html form element names that would have been used by the unaltered form.
hope this helps,
raj