Reinventing APEX Reporting

It's all about changing your reporting state of mind. I used to automatically associate reporting to something like this:

You know the drill, a few HTML tags such as <table>, <tr>, <th>, <td>, etc. I wish we could make standard reports more interesting...

Hold on...

Do you know what "Named Column (row)" templates are? They've been around in APEX since like...forever.

I used to think it was bad practice to have row templates. Now I believe it is the most powerful feature for designing dynamic content.

Here are a few examples of 100% legitimate reports in APEX:

1) Cards Report

Can be found here

2) Collection Report

Can be found here

3) Slider Report

Can be found here

4) Standard Report (but clean)

5) News Report

Can be found here

6) Jobs Report

Can be found here

All the examples above uses a <div> based HTML structure.

So let's create one for that matter...

Row templates uses your named column aliases as a placeholder in your template's HTML. In the code below, #IMG#, #TITLE#, #CONTENT#, #BTN_LINK_1# and #BTN_LABEL_1# are actual column aliases in my SQL query.

Row Template HTML Markup

<div class="#COLUMN_CSS_CLASSES#">    
    <div class="card">
        <div class="card-image">
            #IMG#
            <span class="card-title">#TITLE#</span>
        </div>
        <div class="card-content">
            #CONTENT#
        </div>
        <div class="card-action">
            <p>
                <a href="#BTN_LINK_1#">#BTN_LABEL_1#</a>
            </p>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

Report SQL query

SELECT 'col m6' column_css_classes
        ,'<img src="picture1.jpg">' img
        ,'Card Title' title
        ,'I am a very simple card. I am good at...' content
        ,'#' btn_link_1
        ,'This is a link' btn_label_1
FROM     dual

UNION

SELECT 'col m6'
        ,'<img src="picture2.jpg">' img
        ,'Card Title' title
        ,'I am a very simple card. I am good at...' content
        ,'#' btn_link_1
        ,'This is a link' btn_label_1
FROM     dual

So don't be afraid to use row templates, they are truly useful for making your applications a bit more unique.