Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Apex Listener EA1

We pushed the first EA of the new listener out this week. Give it a try here.  I'll be watching the Apex forum here for question people may have.

Here's a few things I forgot to put into the doc.

1) In the zip is a sample configuration file, apex-config.xml . This contains a short comment on each parameter.

2) To change the default location of the config file OR the cache location. Edit the WEB-INF/web.xml and change the config.dir or cache.dir. These can be absolute paths /u01/klrice/ or environment variables such as ${MY_CONFIG_DIR}

3) The apex exporter and splitter are in the apex.jar file. Simply run "java -jar apex.jar" The splitter is joined into the export so you can do both in one command.  If you've not tried the splitter yet here the flags for it.

    -split                 : Split the export file up into smaller pieces and creates an install.sql to run them all

    -flat                   : Normal -split make a directory structure.  This option will keep it flat.

    -update              : If you export and split over the one that was already done, this will generate an update.sql which is only the files that changed. 

    -nochecksum     : Normally if a split is done over another one, the splitter does a checksum on the files to only touch the files that changed.  This is very handy if you want to check into a source control only the things that change.  So, if the only change from yesterday's export to today's is page 50.  Then only page50.sql will get updated.

Also there's a -zip that didn't make it into the usage which zips up the split files

3 comments:

Alessandro Fortini said...

Hi Kris, my name is Alessandro and i come from italy. I have problem uploading file into apex_application_files when i use apex listener instead of xmldb embedded web server. What type of setup i do in apex-config.xml.

John Flack said...

I am now trying out the ApEx Listener on OC4J. First of all, let me say that I am not an Application Express user, but we do have a number of applications that use the PL/SQL Web Toolkit. Currently, we mostly use OAS 10.1.3, with mod_plsql for access to our Web PL/SQL applications. Our newer applications use JDeveloper/ADF 10.1.3, but eventually we will move to 11g, which means a shift to Fusion Middleware 11g based on WebLogic server. So I was very excited about the advent of the Application Express Listener, as it will make the transition to a new application server easier.

Unfortunately, you are too focused on making this work for Application Express, and leaving other mod_plsql users behind. The major problem that I'm having is that the Apex Listener doesn't support Basic Database Authentication, where the mod_plsql DAD has a database connect string, but no username or password. When you connect to an application using one of these DADS, you are prompted for a username and password and authenticated and connected to the database as that user. My Web PL/SQL applications expect that the pseudocolumn, USER, will be the username of the currently connected user, and that the user will have privileges as granted to that user and/or his/her granted database roles.

Any replacement for mod_plsql MUST have ALL of its functionality, not just functions used by ApEx.

Unknown said...

The doc table is currently hard coded to FLOWS_FILES.WWV_FLOW_FILE_OBJECTS$ It'll be configurable in a future EA.

-kris