Declarative Tabular Form dynamic totals

A common APEX project is to take a customer’s existing spreadsheet-based solution and convert it more-or-less as is into APEX. I’ve got one going at the moment, a budgeting solution where users need to enter their budget requests. They currently enter their requests into an XLS template file which generates subtotals and totals for them.

To do this in APEX I’m going to use a tabular form, and to do the subtotals I’ll use jQuery in a way not too dissimilar to that I described earlier.

Here is a mockup of the screen so far:

There are column totals that need to be added up and updated dynamically (indicated by the green arrows) as well as subtotals within each row (indicated by the red arrows).

I started by looking at the generated items, getting their ids (e.g. “f09_0001” etc) and writing the jQuery code to detect changes, add them up, and put the totals in the relevant items. I then started repeating this code for each column, and thought “hmmm”.

There were two problems with this approach that I could foresee:

1. The generated ids in a tabular form can change if the structure of the query changes  – e.g. what was f08 + f09 => f10 might change to f09 + f10 => f11
2. I was aware of another form that I would need to build, with a similar structure except that there will be two sets of “Jan-Jun” + “Jul-Dec” columns, each with their own subtotal.

I wanted a more declarative solution, so that the heavy lifting will be done in one set of generic javascript functions, and I simply need to put attributes in the relevant columns to activate them. This is how I’ve approached this:

• Create the tabular form as usual (mine is based on an APEX Collection) and remove the standard DML processes, replaced with my own that calls APEX_COLLECTION instead.
• Create a standard report that generates the total items by calling APEX_ITEM.text, with p_attributes=>'data-total="x"' (with a different “x” for each column, e.g. year1).
• Set the Static ID on the tabular form region (e.g. tabularform).
• Set Element Attributes on the Jan-Jun column to data-cell="year1" data-col="year1_jan_jun", similarly for the Jul_Dec column.
• Set Element Attributes on all the Year columns in the tabular form to data-col="yearx", where x is 1..5.
• Set Element Attributes on the total for the first year to data-subtotal="year1".

The following is the query for the totals report region:

select APEX_ITEM.text(1, TO_CHAR(SUM(year1_jan_jun),'FM999G999G999G999G990D00'), p_size=>10, p_maxlength=>2000,
       p_attributes=>'disabled=true class="edit_money" data-total="year1_jan_jun"') as year1_jan_jun
      ,APEX_ITEM.text(2, TO_CHAR(SUM(year1_jul_dec),'FM999G999G999G999G990D00'), p_size=>10, p_maxlength=>2000,
       p_attributes=>'disabled=true class="edit_money" data-total="year1_jul_dec"') as year1_jul_dec
      ,APEX_ITEM.text(3, TO_CHAR(SUM(year1_total),'FM999G999G999G999G990D00'), p_size=>10, p_maxlength=>2000,
       p_attributes=>'disabled=true class="edit_money" data-total="year1"') as year1_total
      ,APEX_ITEM.text(4, TO_CHAR(SUM(year2_total),'FM999G999G999G999G990D00'), p_size=>10, p_maxlength=>2000,
       p_attributes=>'disabled=true class="edit_money" data-total="year2"') as year2_total
      ,APEX_ITEM.text(5, TO_CHAR(SUM(year3_total),'FM999G999G999G999G990D00'), p_size=>10, p_maxlength=>2000,
       p_attributes=>'disabled=true class="edit_money" data-total="year3"') as year3_total
      ,APEX_ITEM.text(6, TO_CHAR(SUM(year4_total),'FM999G999G999G999G990D00'), p_size=>10, p_maxlength=>2000,
       p_attributes=>'disabled=true class="edit_money" data-total="year4"') as year4_total
      ,APEX_ITEM.text(7, TO_CHAR(SUM(year5_total),'FM999G999G999G999G990D00'), p_size=>10, p_maxlength=>2000,
       p_attributes=>'disabled=true class="edit_money" data-total="year5"') as year5_total
from budget_collection_vw

So, to summarise: all the data-cell items get totalled to the data-subtotal item in the same row; and all the data-col items get totalled to the data-total item below the tabular form.

To do all the hard work, I’ve added the following code to my page’s Function and Global Variable Declaration:

function getSum (qry) {
  //get the sum over all items matching the given jQuery search criterion
  var t = 0;
  $(qry).each(function() {
    t += parseFloat($(this).val().replace(/,/g,''))||0;
  });
  return t;
}

function updateSubTotal (item) {
  // update a row-level subtotal
  // the items to add up are identified by data-cell="x"
  // the item to show the total is identified by data-subtotal="x"
  var cell = $(item).data("cell") //get the data-cell attribute
     ,rn = $(item).prop("id").split("_")[1]
     ,t = getSum("input[data-cell='"+cell+"'][id$='_"+rn+"']");

  // we need to temporarily enable then disable the subtotal
  // item in order for the change event to fire
  $("input[data-subtotal="+cell+"][id$='_"+rn+"']")
    .val(t.formatMoney())
    .prop("disabled",false)
    .trigger("change")
    .prop("disabled",true);
}

function updateTotal (item) {
  // update a column total
  var col = $(item).data("col") //get the data-col attribute
     ,t = getSum("input[data-col='"+col+"']");

  $("input[data-total="+col+"]")
    .val(t.formatMoney())
    .trigger("change");
}

In case you’re wondering, I’m re-using the formatMoney function here.

There’s a number of things happening here. On page load, we add a listener for changes to any input item that has a data-cell attribute; this calls updateSubTotal, which detects the row number for the triggering item, adds up all the values for any input item that has the same data-cell value; and puts the total in the input item with a matching data-subtotal attribute.

We also have a listener for changes to any item with a data-col class; when these are changed, updateTotal adds up any item with the same attribute, and puts the total in an item with attribute data-total.

The jQuery selector [id$='_"+rn+"'] makes sure that the row-level code only finds items ending with the given row number (i.e. '*_0001').

The benefit of this declarative approach is that it is much easier to re-use and adapt.

EDIT: fixed the change trigger so that I don’t need to call updateTotal from updateSubTotal.