Sunday, 1 January 2017

Plug-in for Splitting reports into columns

In November I posted about splitting an Apex Report into multiple columns. This solution involved some JavaScript code to be included and called from the Apex page.

One of the comments I got was a question whether the items could also be sorted horizontally. With a small number of rows the current code can result in less columns than specified. I decided to implement this feature:



I also realized that creating a plug-in would make it much easier to implement this functionality. No need to add JS code, call this code at some point and figure out the right value for the parameters...

So here is my first (public) plug-in, Report2columns.
The easiest way to get the plug-in is om the Plug-ins page of  apex.world:


To use it:
  • import the plug-in 
  • create an After Refresh trigger for your report 
  • chose the action report2columns [Plug-In] 
  • enter the number of columns and the sorting direction
That's all there is to it.

 Happy Apexing
at

5 comments:

  1. Koloo3 January 2017 at 02:17

    Hi,

    not in a bad way but how is this important in a real corporate scenario/usage? i am trying to figure out such cases...thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dick Dral3 January 2017 at 07:59

    Hi Koloo Kumo,

    actually the idea for this plug-in came from a business problem. For a travel company I worked on an application to register hotels. They had a list of 80 properties that could be connected to a hotel. The easiest and fastest way for the user is to have a long list with checkboxes. Only the list runs of the screen because it is too long. This plug-in enables to divide the list into column so that it fits within the screen.

    Regards,
    Dick

    ReplyDelete
  3. Marc Feber3 January 2017 at 08:29

    Thanks for sharing the information.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous4 January 2017 at 15:45

    Hi,

    Super! Just what I needed.
    Is it possible to include the CSS definition (the .reportColumn part from your 2016/11/11 "Splitting reports into columns revisited" blog entry) in the plugin please.
    I added it to the "Files" and "File URLs to load" plug-in tabs manually and it works just fine.
    Without it, it doesn't render the columns next to each other.

    Thanks in advance,

    Chris

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dick Dral5 January 2017 at 08:43

    Hi Chris,

    thanks for the tip. I have updated the plug-in.

    Regards,
    Dick

    ReplyDelete