How do I reference adjacent cells in an Apex tabular form?

Question

Friends,

I'm converting an Oracle Form to Apex and have run into problem(s?) which I hope you can help with. Put simply the problem is how do I reference adjacent cells in an Apex tabular form? Is it possible?

The reason for asking is that I need to create a tabular form with 3 dependent select lists, lets call them:

   Divisions

   Cost Centres

   Accounting codes

What should happen is, if the user chooses "Cost Centres" I need to check both Divisions and Accounting codes to restrict what is shown in the "Cost Centres" select list.

None of the fields are mandatory and the user can enter them in any order, e.g. On a new record the three selects lists have no values, the user selects "Accounting Codes" for which they see all the accounting codes after which if they select "Cost Centres" then they see a list of "Cost Centres" restricted by the "Accounting Code"

My first attempt was to put this in a single entry form where implementing this was a lot easier however this is not a viable solution.

The only example that comes close to what I need to implement is this from Denes Kubicek which blends a lot of technologies to achieve the result. Is this the only solution to this problem?

In case of need I am using Apex 4.0

Thanks for any help you maybe able to provide!

Answer 1

I haven't gone through Denes's example in detail, but yes I'm afraid that even with Apex 4.0 implementing cascading LOVs in a tabular form is going to be a complex task involving Javascript and AJAX. Apex 4.0 doesn't support dynamic actions on tabular forms, and it doesn't have the declarative "parent LOV items" attribute for tabular forms as it does for regular forms. In short, I don't think anything that has been added in Apex 4.0 simplifies this task - except that you can now use jQuery code to manipulate the DOM.