Report to Mintenance CREATE Button

Question

We created the tutural application where a Report TAB(P1) is linked to the maintenance Page(P2). When this is done the "ID" is passed from the report page to the maintence page. The CREATE button disapears because the pages are linked and there is a CREATE BUTTON test to see if the ID is set. If we Click on the Minatence TAB one of two things happens.
A) if the is the first time using the application in the session then we get an Error as the P2_ID is not set.
B) the last ID used will be displayed.
How can we change the application so the when the mainence TAB is press it Clears the ID and runs with a CREATE Button, but if navigated from the report page if shows the row to be changed?

Answer 1

if your tabs are Parent Tabs, you could easily set the URL target of your tab to clear the cache for page 2. you'd do that from your Edit Parent Tab screen. you can't do that with a standard tab, though, so you might want to consider clearing your cache on page 2 in an HTML DB process that fires after your current last process on that page. this way your value for P2_ID is consistently cleared after users leave that page. when a user comes back into that page w/o providing a P2_ID value, your create buttons and such should show.
hope this helps,
raj
[Edited by: rmattama on Dec 22, 2003 9:28 AM]
i wanted to post this part of my answer originally, but i wasn't sure about a specific point. anyhow:
as a third option, you can consider using the value of :REQUEST to conditionally fire a process or computation that clears P2_ID. if you pay attention to the way your tabs are working, you'll see that clicking on them either submits your current page to then branch to the next or that they're simply links to your other pages. if your current page has no form fields on it, then html db implements your tabs as the simple links to their associated pages. if the current page does have form fields on it, you'll notice that clicking a standard tab submits the page with the value of :REQUEST being equal to the name of the tab. it's that value of :REQUEST that you can use to conditionally fire a process or computation to clear P2_ID. a conditionally fired after_submit computation on page 1 would do it, for instance.
hope this helps, too,
raj