Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Looking Behind the Scenes
Let's take a look at what the Tabular Form Wizard has created for you—the contents of your tabular form. Edit
page 230 to view the Application Builder page for your tabular form. The Application Builder page will look similar to
the one shown in Figure
7-11
.
Figure 7-11.
The Application Builder page for the tabular form
In the Page Rendering region, APEX has created a report region. But you created a form, didn't you? Despite its
name, a tabular form is actually a SQL report with certain column-level options enabled and some processes added to
handle data manipulation.
In the Page Processing region, in the Processing section, you see two processes, ApplyMRU and ApplyMRD.
These special types of processes handle the multiple-row inserts and updates (ApplyMRU) and deletes (ApplyMRD)
on the
TICKETS
table. These processes handle all DML operations on the
TICKETS
table for you.
APEX has also created validations for several of the columns, which are created automatically based on the
TICKETS
table column definitions plus any UI Defaults defined on the
TICKETS
table.
In the Shared Components region are the usual page and tab templates that are the defaults for your application.
As you can see, the ApplyMRU and ApplyMRD processes make the difference between the report region being a
static report region and a fully functional tabular form. And it's so much easier to let the APEX wizard create all this
for you!
Interactive Reports
Your ticket report is what's called a
classic report
. It's the original style of APEX report and still has practical application
in a variety of situations when the requirement is for a simple list of data with no interactivity. Most applications,
including APEX itself, now employ the APEX interactive report.
Introduced in APEX 3.1, the interactive reports feature allows APEX to quickly and easily include user-driven
ad hoc capabilities in your applications. Interactive reports are greatly enhanced in APEX 4.2. The beauty of APEX
interactive reports is that they give the end user powerful ad hoc query capability with exactly zero lines of code
written by the developer. End users can customize the following:
•
Searching
•
Sort order
•
Columns
