Demo: https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=80981:3
For those of you who are in a long term migration of Forms applications to the Apex platform, this article might be of interest. Especially for developers who relied on Headstart Designer, which was a productivity booster for Oracle Designer, made by the Dutch Oracle Consultancy department.
Part of the Headstart tool was the generic Report Launch Form of which the menu settings and parameters were generated by Designer. With the Headstart Foundation Application – QMS0012F – the generated settings and parameters could be maintained. In essence, only two tables are used to store the relevant data (1) QMS_MODULES and (2) QMS_MDE_PARAMS:
During a long running Forms to Apex migration, it can be nice to have the same functionality of the generic Report Forms also available in Apex. Main features of it are:
- generic report submission form
- report parameters are data driven i.e. retrieved from the QMS_MDE_PARAMS table
- seamless integration of Forms and Reports, so now of Apex and the Oracle Report Server, resulting in a popup / new window of the report output.
In the following sections I will explain how I enabled this functionality in Apex we were all heavily used to: