Tabular Form Validation: Comparing Two Columns vs Check Constraint

Question

What is the best approach for validating that one column needs to be greater than another column in a tabular form when attempting to save. (E.g. An effective date and expirey date column. The expirey date column >= effective date column)
At the moment I have a check constraint on the two columns at the database level which is fine but it returns and passes up a pretty cryptic (from a business user perspective) unfriendly message to the user as follows:
Error in mru internal routine: ORA-20001: Error in MRU: row= 1, ORA-02290: check constraint (IDMTC.ADDRESS_TYPE_CON) violated, update "IDMTC"."ADDRESS_TYPE" set "ID" = :b1, "CODE" = :b2, "NAME" = :b3, "LOV_SORT_ORDER" = :b4, "DESCRIPTION" = :b5, "EFFECTIVE_DATE" = :b6, "EXPIRY_DATE" = :b7 where "ID" = :p_pk_col
Unable to process update.
Is there a way to inject, detect and/or replace this with a friendlier business user message? I have confirmed that the "Unable to process update." text at the bottom below the MRU Internal routine error raised from my check constraint is the process error message for my Apply MRU process.
I was hesitating going down a larger page level validation where I loop through the tabular form array and/or inject some client side Javascript.
Any advice? Have I simply overlooked some tabular form options for validating using cross column values?
Thanks,
Jeff

Answer 1

Jeff..Thanks for the response.
However because I am working in a tabular form at design time I don't know which controls I can reference in a dynamic action, or custom Javascript routine other than selecting all elements in a column using JQuery, etc.
I have decided to go with for the time being an approach I found here: doing validation on tabular form
My code ended up looking something like and was entered into a page level validation as a PL/SQL function body returning error text.:
DECLARE
l_error VARCHAR2 (4000);
BEGIN
FOR i IN 1 .. apex_application.g_f02.COUNT
LOOP
--If Expiry date is older then effective date
IF nvl(apex_application.g_f08 (i), to_date('31-DEC-9999', 'dd-mon-yyyy')) < apex_application.g_f07 (i) THEN
l_error :=
l_error
|| '</br>'
|| 'Row '
|| i
|| ': Expiry date must be greater than effective date '
|| ' for maintenance item name: '
|| apex_application.g_f03 (i);
END IF;
END LOOP;
RETURN LTRIM (l_error, '</br>');
END;
I had been hoping with Apex 4+ that there was additional native functionality to do this type of validation or somehow be able to reference a column or control name instead of a generic array column so that my code was better self documenting.
It works for now...but would love to revisit with maybe a cleaner client side solution that does the validation and highlights the invalid element since I still maintain data integrity at the db with the check constraint.
Thanks,
Jeff