We had seen that we can make a dynamic classic report by picking Function Returning SQL Query as the region source in the Dynamic query region in APEX section of Chapter 2, Conventional Reporting in APEX. We do not have this liberty in IRs, but we can use the table function using both native and interface approach and APEX collections to create dynamic reports in IR.
Let us first talk about the table function. It accepts a collection or a ref cursor and is used in the from clause of a query. The table function can be used as any other physical table. Two important features associated with a table function are pipelining and partitioning. We will see information about both of these in the coming sections. Note the subtle point here. table() accepts a ref cursor or a collection as an argument. We can define a stored function that returns either one of these and pass the function as an arguement to table(). Until now, we have been referencing table(...