Thursday, September 9, 2010

APEX IR: Column Help

I was working with an Interactive Report (IR) in APEX 4.0 and noticed that when the column header is clicked there's a Column Information button:


When clicked it displays the column help:


At first I thought this was a new APEX 4.0 feature and then I tested it on a 3.2 instance and noticed that the column information button was present as well.

Either way, it's a really nice feature to have since you can provide column information to users.

The following query helps to identify which IR columns have the default "No help available for this page item." message. You may want to change this since it says "... page item." rather than "column"

SELECT ap.page_id,
ap.page_name,
irc.column_alias,
irc.help_text
FROM apex_application_page_ir_col irc, apex_application_pages ap
WHERE irc.application_id = :app_id
AND irc.application_id = ap.application_id
AND irc.page_id = ap.page_id
AND irc.help_text = 'No help available for this page item.' -- Default help text message

2 comments:

  1. Is there an api or table where one could update the HELP_TEXT via pl/sql? For example, I have several interactive reports with the same column that I would like to set the help_desk from a centralized source. Being able to update a single table and have a job go out and update the various IR help_text fields would be useful.

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  2. Hi,

    Not that I know of. You could try to have a standardized help text table and load it from there. You can get some ideas from this post: http://www.talkapex.com/2009/10/standardizing-help-text-in-apex.html

    Martin

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