Formating and Exporting a Report Column

Sometimes you need to format a report column and if you need to do that in the report SQL, you will be faced with a problem while exporting the report - the formatted values will be exported 1:1 and you will see those ugly html tags among the exported data. In early days of APEX people recommended using two columns - one to display in a report and hide it while exporting and one hidden column used for exports only instead. You would then use a condition like this:

apex_application.g_excel_format = FALSE

to says not to export or the opposite one:

apex_application.g_excel_format = TRUE

to say to export.This solution may work with a standard report but it can't be used efficiently with Interactive Reports.

Just in case you didn't know, you can solve that problem easily. See this example at apex.oracle.com. There, I am using a function to format a string and use the value of the current request to see if the report is simply getting rendered on the page or exported. If the report is exported, I will not use the formatting tags and return the values as it was parsed.