APEX

Hello everyone,

Running APEX 3.2.1.00.11

I am trying to generate values for a page item using a PL/SQL function body. It parses and concatenates many rows of our databases. In one case I need to return some generated javascript code to pre-load a auto-suggest class. In the other case, I need to concatenate a variable number of comment postings for a given article "to create a threaded blog view" (the number of comments could get quite large).

My problem is that APEX is maxing out at 32767 characters. When I defined my function with a VARCHAR2(32767) I got a buffer too small error. When I tried to run it using a CLOB I got a "ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error string". I'm assuming this happens when it tries to exit the PL/SQL function and return control back to APEX (some type of CLOB -> VARCHAR2 conversion - but once again i'm just guessing).

I tried to verify the code works fine by running it in sql developer. When using DBMS.OUTPUT.PUT_LINE I got the same ORA-06502 error. When I replaced the return string with a "function completed" message instead, it ran fine and printed out the success message.

To validate it wasn't the contents of the string, I changed the function to put a DBMS.OUTPUT.PUT_LINE on each iteration through the result sets that builds the large concatenated string. Every line printed without issue and no errors were generated...

So, my question is...how can I generate text > 32k in size and display it to the user through APEX?

Please don't respond and say that I shouldn't be loading that much into a webpage initially and that I should be using AJAX to search through values and load them on the fly. That could work for the select list (if I can get past APEX's very particular URL parsing system) but it is not suitable for the "blog comments" functionality.


Thanksss!!