Thursday, July 26, 2007

Apex substitution strings cross reference chart

This is a tentative (and hopefully definitive) cross reference chart telling you at a glance if you can use a certain substitution string inside a given template definition and it is supposed to apply to APEX 3.0, although most of these definitions should work on older versions.

Template substitutions are defined as #UPPERCASE_TEXT# strings, however there are a number of useful substitution strings that can be used inside templates and must be specified in the alternate format delimited by & and . (period), like &BROWSER_LANGUAGE., &SESSION. or any user-specified global substitution strings stored in the Application Definition.

Please note that using uppercase is mandatory.

While compiling this chart i found a few mistakes and omissions in the online help of Apex 3.0.
For instance in the report template section of the help guide #ALIGN# is mentioned but the real substitution string, as you can see in some of the built-in templates is #ALIGNMENT#.
The same happens with #ROW_NUM#, whose real counterpart is #ROWNUM#.

It took also some time to test hierarchical lists and calendar templates that are almost undocumented.
Concerning calendar templates i had to introduce the yellow color as you can see at the bottom of the table, because a calendar template is made up of an awful number of subtemplates and certainly there can be one or two where the substitution doesn't work but also where it makes little sense to use it.
May be that in version 2.0 i come up with a fine-grained calendar cross reference chart, but don't expect this to happen any time soon ;-)



Updates:
2009/03/27: #COLUMN_HEADER_NAME# can be used inside any of the "Column Template n" attributes in the report template page.
2012/12/20: #COLUMN_WIDTH# added, available since APEX 4.0.
2013/06/12: changed #APP_VERSION# map, removed support from Page Body Template.

8 comments:

Sylvain Michaud said...

Great job. Thanks !

Byte64 said...

Thank you,
i am still working on the layout, i am not yet happy with the format.

Bye,
Flavio

Patrick Wolf said...

Flavio,

great work.

BTW, did you do a posting over on the OTN forum, so that they are going to update the online help.

Patrick

Byte64 said...

Thank you Patrick,
i'll certainly write something in the OTN forum.

Cheers,
Flavio

Byte64 said...

#BUTTON_ID# entry comment has been updated.
For further information see this OTN forum thread.

Dominique Fortin said...

#REGION_STATIC_ID# is missing. It can be used in the Region template defintion.

Anonymous said...

Looks like the chart is missing. Any chance on it coming back or anyone know where there is another list of these substitution strings?

Byte64 said...

Thanks for reporting the issue, the chart is back now.

Flavio

yes you can!

Two great ways to help us out with a minimal effort. Click on the Google Plus +1 button above or...
We appreciate your support!

latest articles