About a plug-in providing native Apex functionality

This Saturday I published a plug-in on apex.world to create subheaders in a classic report. I got the idea while developing a long report and it seemed like a good idea to create a plugin for it to wrap and parameterize the JavaScript code. I searched the internet for the existence of such a plug-in and found nothing.
So I set out to create the plug-in. After finishing it I wrote a blogpost and added it to the plug-in repository on apex.world. And I proudly tweeted about it.
Pretty soon I got a reply from Peter Raganitz: "Wouldn’t a control break do just that?".

I set out to check this and.. he is absolutely right. This functionality is available in Apex in a declarative way!

The only extra needed is a small CSS definition for the visuals of the headers:

.apex_report_break {

1. background-color: lightgrey!important;
2. font-weight: bold;
3. padding: 8px 12px;
4. border: 1px solid lightgrey;
5. font-size: 12px;

}

There are just two differences with the plug-in:

1. The first heading stays above the break title. You can see this behavior on my demo site
2. The plug-in functions correctly in combination with my Report2columns plug-in, as shown in the previous blogpost ( this should probably be seen as a flaw in the Report2columns plug-in )

Lessons learned

What did I learn from this:

1. We have got a great Oracle Apex community, where you get almost instant feedback. Thank you Peter for noticing and taking the effort to send me the message :-).
2. Research better before building a solution. Because there are a lot of ways to create functionality it is possible to end up with a suboptimal solution. So next time I will look better in the native functionality of Apex
3. Oracle Apex has got a lot of great functionality out of the box ( of course I knew that already ;-) )