Overview
Utilising the Column Attribute of Type Plain Text (based on List of Values) in the Application Express App Builder can be an efficient and useful way of displaying lookup data on your Interactive Report, but be aware of the default settings.
Using a List of Values in an Interactive Report
If you've never come across it before, there is a setting on a report column that allows you to use a List of Values to show "Value/Description" type information that you would otherwise have to build into a View or run a separate query to obtain.
It is a nice feature and can streamline your code, as well as enforcing consistency by using the same List of Values throughout your application.
So what's not to like?
While it's undeniably a useful feature, you need to be aware of the column settings that are associated with this Column Type. Used incorrectly it can be very confusing for the users of your application.
There is a column attribute further down the column settings list under the Column Filter section named Type. By default this is set to Use Named List of Values to Filter Exact Match.
If you run the report and click the Header of your column based on an LOV, you will get a list of possible values by which to filter the column. Look closely and you will see that the list contains ALL of the possible values for this column and not just the ones that are shown in the report.
Spot the odd ones out.
Desired Outcome
Seeing all possible values in the Header list may be exactly how you'd like this to work, and if that's the case, you can stop reading.
If instead, you'd rather just see the list of values reflecting the data in the report, then you can do this by changing the Type under the Column Filter section to Default based on Column Type.
Voila! Your application users are no longer confused.