Storing live hyperlinks instead of text in a table

Question

Hi
I wanted to do the following.
create an excel spreadsheet with the following columns and import it into xe
to create a table called PRICING which looked like:
item_id VARCHAR2(30)
item_desc VARCHAR2(100)
item_value NUMBER
item_url VARCHAR2(30)
this worked OK
Then I made an application useing the xe application builder which showed the
table in a report.
The item_url column showed the url in text
http:\\mydomain.com:8080\pics\somepic.jpg
however it was text as it had been imported from a .csv file. The formatting
in excel was lost.
I would have liked it to show as a live url which could be clicked by the user. Ideally i may have liked to display some alternative text
i.e Picture of Widget45 with the typical blue font colour and underline instead of the actual http:\\....\widget45.pc. Or perhaps a thumb nail pic may be even better
Can I do this with xe and xe application builder or do i need to use some other tool.
Perhaps this should be a feature for future to allow people to work in excel and
publish to xe retaining hyperlinks etc.
thanks
mamuks

Answer 1

Try to create a new report region using the following query:
select item_id, htf.anchor(item_url, item_desc) item_link
  from PRICINGThis will generate a hyperlink using the item_url and the item_desc as the label.
Thus you can create all html you like in a sql query and have Apex simply display it.
You could even do it this way:
select item_id, '<A href="'|| item_url || '" >'|| item_desc ||'</A>' item_link from pricing~Dietmar.