Stuff mostly around Oracle SQL Developer, Data Modeler, the APEX Listener and other general Oracle development thing in general.

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.

JCFlack 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.

Kris Rice said...

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

-kris