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After upgrade APEX 22.1 > 24.2: Completely breaks XML structure for empty result sets in print documents

Bozo03010 hours ago — edited 10 hours ago

Hi everyone,

I recently migrated from APEX 22.1 to 24.2 and discovered a breaking change in how print documents generate XML for empty result sets.

Previous behavior (APEX 22.1): When my report query returned no rows, the XML structure included empty row elements:

<ROWSET1>
  <ROWSET1_ROW>
    <COLUMN1></COLUMN1>
    <COLUMN2></COLUMN2>
    <COLUMN3></COLUMN3>
  </ROWSET1_ROW>
</ROWSET1>

Current behavior (APEX 24.2): The same empty result set now generates a self-closing tag:

<ROWSET1/>

Problem: My RTF templates have for-each loops and conditions like <?for-each:ROWSET1_ROW?><?if:COLUMN1!=''?> that no longer work because there are no ROWSET1_ROW elements to iterate through when the query returns empty results.

Questions:

Is this an intentional change or a bug?
Is there a parameter or setting to maintain the previous XML structure?
What's the recommended approach for handling this breaking change?

I can work around this by modifying my SQL queries to always return at least one row with placeholder values, but this seems like a significant breaking change that could affect many existing applications.

Has anyone else encountered this issue after upgrading? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.