Apex Reports: One Link, Multiple Destinations

Every Interactive Report has an optional set of “Link” attributes that allow you to specify the location where the user should be redirected if they click a link next to a record in the report. You can choose “Link to Custom Target” and use the Link Builder to easily specify the target application, page, item values to pass, and other attributes.

What if the report combines different entities, and you need to direct the user to a different page depending on the type of entity? Or, if you need to direct the user to a different page with different attributes depending on the status of the record?

One method is to generate the URL in the report query using apex_page.get_url (Apex 5+) or apex_util.prepare_url (Apex 4 or earlier), or (God forbid) you could generate the url yourself using string concatenation.

A more declarative solution is to instead use Apex page redirects. This solution involves the following:

1. Add some hidden items to the page to store the parameters for each target page;
2. Add a Branch to the page for each target page; and
3. Add a Request to the link to signal the page that a redirect has been requested.

Here’s an example. My page 550 has an interactive report which combines TI records with TRQ records (both of which have a very similar structure). If the user clicks on a TI record they should be redirected to p510 with the corresponding TI_ID, and if they click on a TRQ record they should be redirected to p305 with the corresponding TRQ_ID.

Here’s the link attributes for this report:

Notice that the page now redirects back to itself with the request set to “GOTO_TARGET”, along with the IDs required. My report query has been constructed so that every record will only have a TI_ID or a TRQ_ID, never both at the same time; so the link will ensure that only one of the P550_GOTO_xxx_ID values will be set.

The page then just needs two Branches: one for each target. Conditions on each branch ensures they only get activated if the request has been set, and the branch is selected based on which “GOTO ID” item has been set:

For a normal navigation to this report (e.g. from another page), the request should be blank (or some other value) so none of the Branches should be triggered.

For a relatively simple scenario like this, I like the declarative approach. Each branch can take advantage of the full range of Apex features such as the link builder, security conditions, build options, etc.

Note: this method works just as well for Classic report links as well.

The thing to be mindful of is that the order of the branches, and the condition on each branch, must be carefully selected so that the correct branch is activated in each situation. I’ve shown a simple example which works because I have ensured that only one of the ID parameters is set at the same time. If a record has both IDs, the condition on the first branch “GOTO_TARGET (TI_ID)” will evaluate to True and it will be used, regardless of what GOTO_TRQ_ID was set to.

If there were numerous potential destination pages, with a large number of parameters to pass, I might choose the apex_page.get_url method instead.

Related

• APEX_PAGE.get_url