APEX Dynamic Action silently fails – a story

Here is a short story about a little problem that caused me a bit of grief; but in the end had a simple cause and a simple fix.

I had a dynamic action in my APEX 4.1 app that had to run some PL/SQL – which was working fine, except the PL/SQL kept on getting longer and longer and more complex; so quite naturally I wanted it to be encapsulated in a database procedure.

I did so, but it didn’t work: the page ran without error, but it seemed like the dynamic action wasn’t firing. It was supposed to change the value of some display items on the page in response to the change of a radio button item, but now they weren’t changing! There was no debug warnings or logs to give a hint either. I tried using Chrome’s developer tools to trace it but that just showed me a very high-level view of what the client was doing, and didn’t report any errors or warnings.

I reverted to my original code, and it worked fine. Ok, so that means it’s probably a problem with my procedure.

I checked and rechecked my procedure. Didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it. I added a line into the procedure to raise an exception. The APEX page dutifully reported the PL/SQL error in the Ajax call – which means that my procedure was being called successfully. Also, I included the return values in the exception message, and this proved that my procedure was correctly determining the values. They just weren’t being returned to the items on the page.

I tried raising an exception in the apex dynamic action’s PL/SQL Code. That worked. The exception message correctly showed the new values were being returned; they still weren’t being populated on the page.

I tried removing all the items from the Page Items to Return setting; then I gradually added them back in, one by one. I narrowed it down to just one item. If I included that item, none of the items were being updated when the procedure returned. If I excluded that item, all the other items were correctly being updated when the procedure returned. Of course, that wasn’t a solution, because there was a cascade of other dynamic actions that were dependent on that particular item, so it has to be updated.

After lunch and a short walk, it occurred to me: unlike the other parameters, that particular parameter was anchored to a database column defined as CHAR(1). Could that be a problem?

"change code at random... bug solved"Sure enough, when I changed the parameter’s data type from column%TYPE (which mapped to a CHAR) to just a plain VARCHAR2, everything worked.

Yet another reason to avoid CHAR, I guess.

APEX and Application Contexts
Trivia question: Why does the 2nd Drop Work?

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