APEX 5: Using Font Awesome Icons in Report

APEX 5 is currently in Early Adaptor 2, so the exact implementation of this blogpost might change when APEX 5 goes GA.
Font Awesome is standard included with APEX 5 and you can use the icons on buttons, there is a special property for that.
I was playing around the other day and I wanted to include some Font Awesome icons in my report.
First create a report (classic or interactive, whatever you want) and use the following query:

select empno
      ,case mod (rownum, 2)
       when 0 then 'male'
       when 1 then 'female'
       end gender
      ,ename
      ,job
  from emp

Because the EMP table doesn't have a gender column, I decided to create one using a CASE statement. Some are "male" and some are "female".
Navigate to the GENDER column.

With the GENDER column highlighted, move your attention to the right side of the Page Designer and focus on the Properties panel.
In the section labelled "Column Formatting", enter the following for "HTML Expression":

<span class="t-Icon fa-#GENDER#"></span>

The names of the font awesome icons always start with "fa-", so this is prefixed to the content of the GENDER column. The result of a "female"-rows will be

<span class="t-Icon fa-female"></span>

For "male"-rows it will be

<span class="t-Icon fa-male"></span>

And that's it.
The report will look like the screenshot below. As you can see there are icons for the males and the females in the EMP table.

APEX_ESCAPE, a new (and better) way of HTF.ESCAPE_SC

Last week, at the yearly ODTUG Kscope Conference, I did my presentation "Getting Started with APEX Plugin Development". After the session Patrick Wolf, Principal Member of Technical Staff for APEX, pointed out an improvement that could be made.
In the presentation I point out the need to escape the input that you get from a user of the plugin in order to protect the plugin from unwanted use, like SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting and the like.
In the example plugin that is created in the presentation, I use HTP.ESCAPE_SC to escape the special characters (hence the name _SC). There is a newer and better method to escape the special characters.
By default the extended level of escaping is enabled, but this can be overridden (for whatever reason).
To illustrate both the extended and the basic level of escaping, the examples below set the level explicitly.

SQL> begin
  2     apex_escape.set_html_escaping_mode (p_mode => 'E');
  3  end;
  4  /

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

SQL> select sys.htf.escape_sc ('hello &"<>''/') htf
  2       , apex_escape.html ('hello &"<>''/') escape
  3    from dual
  4  /

HTF                            ESCAPE
------------------------------ ----------------------------------------
hello &amp;&quot;&lt;&gt;'/    hello &amp;&quot;&lt;&gt;&#x27;&#x2F;

With the extended level of escaping, the forward slash and the single quote are escaped as well.
When you set the escaping level to Basic (example below), you will get the same results as if you were using HTF.ESCAPE_SC.

SQL> begin
  2     apex_escape.set_html_escaping_mode (p_mode => 'B');
  3  end;
  4  /

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

SQL> select sys.htf.escape_sc ('hello &"<>''/') htf
  2       , apex_escape.html ('hello &"<>''/') escape
  3    from dual
  4  ;

HTF                            ESCAPE
------------------------------ ----------------------------------------
hello &amp;&quot;&lt;&gt;'/    hello &amp;&quot;&lt;&gt;'/

Links

Documentation on APEX_ESCAPE