APEX

I mentioned this as a side-note in another forum posting, but wanted to explicitly call it out, because if I'm right, I think it's a good thing for people to know about.

I created a report region, with some of the values returning null. However, when I look at the HTML source, the cells that are null are actually returning " ".

At first, I thought this was a bug. This is because if you define that column as a link, and set Strip HTML to No, you end up with hyperlinks on a single whitespace character. (You won't see a link if Strip HTML is set to Yes.) This is probably not the intended result -- at least, it wasn't for me. There are workarounds to this, but they are somewhat messy -- and even messier still if your link is based on an image (like the Edit icon) instead of plain text.

However, on further examination, I suspect this is actually a feature. Some older browsers (or newer ones in quirks mode) fail to render a table cell's borders if the contents are empty. The old-school fix for this was to put a single non-breaking space in the cell, so visually it would still appear empty, but semantically the browser wouldn't think so, and would render the borders.

Can someone from Oracle confirm if my hypothesis is correct?

If so, how about an option on the Report Attributes tab in a future release to turn this off, so the link scenario described above can be made to work? Very few modern browsers still require this hack, if you're using the right doctype, so at this point, I wonder if it makes more sense to have users hack the SQL output to return an   rather the other way around.

Cheers.