APEX

Hi there,

im absolutely new to APEX (as u can see it`s my first post ;)), i read the documentations i found on the oracle website and know at least the basics...
So i started to create my first application and got already my first problem :D Maybe you can tell me if what i want to do is possible and how to do it.

I have several pages with a form on the left side and a sql report on the right side.
The form contains some fields which are list of values (fields which contain foreign keys so the user can just select a valid value). next to every list of value field i have a button. when the user clicks on the button i have a branch to the same page and the sql report gets updated. depending on which button next to the list of values with the foreign keys was pressed it shows the complete table the list of values references to (so the user can see what the foreign key he is selecting actually contains). after some work i finally made this work.

But the problem is: When the user enters some values into the form and then clicks on a button to see what the foreign keys contain the values he already entered are gone. But i want the values he entered to stay in the form after he pressed the button. is there a easy way to do that? the only thing i could imagine is to create a variable for every form field, save the current values into the variable before the page gets submitted and write the values of the variables back into the form when the page reloads. but that sounds kind of stupid... i would have to do that for every page of this kind (which are a lot). so is there a better way?

thx a lot :)