The APEX engine delegates nearly all of the data filtering operations an end-user can perform in your application to the BOSS REST endpoint for server-side execution. This includes case-insensitive tokenized row search. When the Resource Type of the BOSS REST Data Source is Business Object/View or Extraction View, then the row search is translated into an appropriate combination of case-insensitive BOSS like filters. In contrast, when the Resource Type is Search View, the row search is translated into appropriate BOSS keyword search for faster full-text searching.

In addition, when defining a region, you can specify an External Filter using a BOSS REST Service filter expression. This is a SQL-like predicate using the case-sensitive business object attribute names from the REST payload. For reference, the attribute names are what appears in the Selector field of each data profile column’s definition. The filter language supports AND and OR conjunctions, grouping using parentheses, and operations.

If a BOSS REST Data Source defines an URL Pattern parameter named additionalExternalFilter, then this parameter can be assigned a value at runtime to handle more dynamic filtering use cases. The value must be a syntactically legal BOSS filter predicate with a balanced set of left and right parenthesis, or an invalid filter error will result at runtime.

The following is example of what a filter might look like:

(category like 'SALES%' or (purchased >= '2023-07-15' and purchased <='2023-07-31'))

You can perform case-insensitive searches by using the tilde-modified operators like this:

• lastName ~= 'STAR'
• lastName ~like '%STAR%'

External filters do not support bind variables, but they do support APEX substitution parameters (for example, &P3_NAME.). Substitution parameters must be used as the right side of a filter predicate and their values will be automatically single-quoted by the APEX engine when the substituted value is replaced at runtime. For example, an external WHERE clause might look similar to this:

lastName ~= &P3_NAME.

This example assumes the P3_NAME page item contains the value CHIP, the BOSS REST service will see the external where clause of:

lastName ~= 'CHIP'

This also works well for numerical values since the BOSS server’s filter processing allows numerical values to also be quoted on the right-hand side of a filter expression like:

numberOfDependents > &P3_NUM_DEPS.

This example assumes the value of the page item is 2 will turn into:

numberOfDependents > '2'