Wierd sorting behavior in report

Question

I have a report with many fields, a region to show/hide columns, and a region for searching (scalar search fields and multi-select fields). Sorting by toggling a column header doesn't sort the field, it does something, but it doesn't sort. Something really strange is I have a column named CPU Count and when I click on the column header for CPU Arch, it sorts the CPU Count column.
I recently did the following to change NLS_SORT to BINARY_CI and
1. In the application attributes, I set the 'Application Language Derived From'
globalization attribute to "No NLS (Application not translated)", and
left the 'Application Primary Language' setting alone (English...).
2. Created a BEFORE HEADER and ON SUBMIT BEFORE COMPUTATIONS application level process as a PL/SQL Anonymous Block to force the NLS settings using ALTER SESSION commands. Set the Sequence to 0 for both.
execute immediate 'ALTER SESSION SET NLS_DATE_FORMAT="DD-MON-YYYY"';
execute immediate 'ALTER SESSION SET NLS_SORT="BINARY_CI"';
Could this have had any impact? I don't know if column sorting worked before I made those changes or not. Looking for ideas before I take this out.
Karen

Answer 1

Karen,
The good news is that we can see the problem you are having.
The bad news is that we're going to have to ask you to do a bit more work so we can get to the bottom of it. If you don't mind, here is the request from Marc (our reports engine expert):
"I tried to figure out what's going on with this report, but I don't know. My guess would be some combination of changed column sequence, conditional
display of columns and show/no show columns. I tried a number of different scenarios locally, but they always worked. And in the example that user sent
us, the first couple of columns seem to be working fine. I tried purging preferences, etc., but I'm still getting strange results for e.g. the usage
column. I would need to get a reproducible case set up on my local PC, so that I can add some more debug output to reports3.plb. So if this person
could provide us with a simplified example, incl. DDL script and data load scripts that we can install locally, I can a try to investigate this further. It would also help if the user could either step by step re-create this report, with perhaps fewer columns, without changing the column sequence at first, and only later hooking up column conditions, so that we can get some more information on when the sorting gets messed up."
Thanks,
Scott