Updatable Report (MRU) Based on PL/SQL?

Question

Hi APEX Community,
I recently started playing with Updateable Reports (MRUs). The functionality seems great but I can’t seem to find a place to write PL/SQL to restrict the records returned.
Usually I would use code (with report typr PL/SQL function returning SQL query) along the lines of:
declare
     q varchar2(4000);
     v number;
begin
     v := :P10_EMP_ID;
     q := 'select
     "PATIENT_ID",
     "EMP_ID",
     "CREATION_DATE",
     "CREATED_BY",
     "LAST_UPDATE_DATE",
     "LAST_UPDATE_BY"
     from PATIENT where "EMP_ID" = '''||v||'''';
     return q;
end;
However reports of type Updatable Report only except SQL not PL/SQL.
This seems to me quite simple functionality, am I missing something??
Thanks in Advance,
Immanuel

Answer 1

Marc: In this simple case, yes, we can easily use standard SQL with bind variables referring to session state.
But sometimes the table is very large and there are multiple filters needed to select the desired rows. Writing the query like
select ...
from t
where (:P1_FILTER1 is null or filter1=:P1_FILTER1)
and    (:P1_FILTER2 is null or filter2=:P1_FILTER2)
and ...make the page very slow to load.
It would be much more performant to write the query as a PL/SQL function returning SQL query like
declare
q long;
begin
  q := select ... from t where 1=1 ';
  if (:P1_FILTER1 is not null) then
    q := q||' and filter1=:P1_FILTER1';
  end if;
  if (:P1_FILTER2 is not null) then
    q := q||' and filter2=:P1_FILTER2';
  end if;
  return q;
end;and still be able to use the builtin MRU and Add Rows processes instead of writing our own.
Maybe this could be an enhancement for 3.0?