APEX

Hi there,

Pipelined functions are great, specially when you want to encapsulate the access to tables instead of just SELECTing from them (what I am doing a lot in my current project.)

However Apex 4 does not like them, at least not for tabular forms...

I want to handle myself the update/insert/delete process, so I don't need the MRU default functionality (all the access to the data is via APIs). But at the same time I want to just SELECT from my pipelined function and set the item types using the builder interface as with any tabular form (without having to use the apex_item API). Also I want to be able to use tabular form validation.

To start with, you can only create a tabular form based on a table or view. To overcome this issue, I created a dummy view with the fields I wanted and created my tabular form on it. Then I changed the FROM clause to FROM TABLE(myfunction). It didn't work as it seems it tries to select the ROWID for each row... Of course my pipelined function doesn't return one but I don't need one anyway as I will be doing the data manipulation myself based on the PK.

For this to work, I had to create a collection, populate it with the result of the pipelined function in a page process every time the page is loaded, create a view on that collection and base the tabular form on the view... A lot of work and overhead for something that should be very simple in principle.

Then, I found out that if I remove the default MRU process that is automatically created, the tabular form validations stop working (as I posted in another thread). So I have to leave a "dummy" MRU process there with condition = never for it to work.

The application I am working on is all based on API calls and pipelined functions so all this work has to be repeated for each tabular form that is needed.

If it was possible to base a tabular form directly on a pipelined function it would be such an elegant solution.

Is there a better way to implement this? Shouldn't Apex be more compatible with pipelined functions? (at least in regards to tabular forms, they work well with normal forms, reports, LOVs etc)

Thanks
Luis