I think it was 2001-2002 our company decided to migrate to Developer 6i based build from Developer 2000 (4.5). We had loads of fun setting up the Arabic part for the forms runtime. I remember setting up the NLS_LANG string as ‘ARMSAWIN1256’ instead of ‘AR8MSWIN1256’ and wasting hours trying to figure out what went wrong.
If not often, I receive requests once in a while, asking about setting up the Arabic (Right to left languages) environment for client server architecture. Today I am “Showing” you a how to, rather than typing the entire stuff here :)
This Video demonstrates the following few
Creating a database using AR8MSWIN1256 character set
Setting up the languages and Unicode parameters to show correct languages
Even though my blog has reached 600k+ visits, I am one of those “lucky” tech bloggers who is hardly reached through emails for some specific tips and helps.
One of the recent were about migrating from Developer 6i developed web deployment to Windows 2008 R2, and the asker decided to approach me through email after reading my post about installing Developer 6i suite on Windows 7 and later OS
There were many emails until I realized they have a web deployment! Using Developer 6i & I was truly impressed. Developer 6i setup was one of the toughest, when I tried it by 2004-2005 period and I truly given up once after a number of failures to setup it properly and “googling” wasn’t as efficient as today when a single search fetches you hundreds of blog posts those explain such setups minutely so that a beginner can, without sweating much could, almost setup anything!
The hacks I posted with my blog towards installing Developer 6i on Windows 7/later and Windows Servers did have it’s own drawbacks. Many of the Oracle products like Oracle graphs doesn’t work with the .dll hacks & we experienced unexpected crashes and I have made sure that I did warn the enthusiasts about them with my blog. Did it stop people from taking risks? I don’t think so
Our legacy Oracle database server hardware was 14 years old when we decided to finally decommission it. Many places around the world businesses never listen to the Administrators complaining about the age of hardware and how difficult it is to maintain obsolete hardware and software. Oracle database(proprietary) must be one of the widely used database without proper licensing and I hardly believe many small organizations will ever pay the unbelievable prices Oracle tries to extract from customers when they want to do proper licensing. Many of those environments may have new admins and the entire development teams dispersed or the software company that has developed the software diversified and started selling fish. Anyway, my asker’s situation was not far different. His hardware was obsolete and the company has brought him a new hardware with 4GB memory and he was desperately looking for a method to migrate from his Windows 2003 server to Windows 2008 R2 server
Can you/should you take risks by trying to migrate to a newer OS because there are “few hacks” available over internet?
I work as information technology manager and I will not let it happen, knowing and after having bad experiences. Instead I will try to find better solutions, like converting your Windows 2003 physical machine into a Virtual Machine and going online from a newer hardware and OS
Mr. Asker’s scenario
Windows 2003 Server with Developer 6i Web deployment and Oracle database 10g and his hardware has just 2GB memory!
His requirement
Want to start using the new hardware and Windows 2008 R2. Can’t take risks
My suggestion to him
Use VMWare’s P2V converter, Convert the legacy server into a VM
From the new hardware, run the VM
While I am NOT at all happy with the 4GB physical memory, I will suggest anyone who wants to go with such an approach to upgrade their hardware to have minimum 8GB so that the Windows 2008 R2 can reserve 4GB for itself, 3GB maximum for the 32Bit Windows 2003 Server and tweaking the Oracle database SGA to 40% of from the 3GB reserved for the VM!
Let us consider the few advantages of converting legacy hardware to virtual machines quickly
One can always take a full backup of the VM, based on mission criticality, in addition to the database backups. Such backups will help the administrators to restore the whole “machine”, if something goes drastically wrong
No headaches to figure out how the deployment was made, especially when there are hardly any documentations available explaining the setups
My asker got so excited that he stopped answering my consequent mails checking about progresses. That’s the downside of free consultancy in most of the cases. Oh well, that was not my first experience anyway. This year itself I helped someone to setup a 12c environment and when he was online, he told me how he had tears in his eyes and later he stopped answering my calls
I hope I made some sense with this post and if you are someone who is frantically looking for a way to “Migrate” without risking much, give it a try. Have comments or need more clarifications? Use the comments area to let me know about them.
There are no guarantees that Windows 7 and Windows 8 machines will support Client/Server architecture applications developed by Oracle developer 6i, even after your patch certain .dll files (refer to our previous post here )
So, it is time to move on. Many legacy applications cannot be discontinued as they serve the businesses in tailored manner. Hence the best practices should include migration to latest Oracle products and retaining such applications for next “N” number of years.
We are going to draft the easiest methods to migrate to Oracle Weblogic server 10.3.6 & Developer suite 11g briefly over here. Please read on how to install the weblogic server here
Make sure you have made multiple backups for your forms 6i source modules & reports
Create local folders from development machines with easily identifiable names (eg: myapp11gtest)
Start compiling your 6i modules (forms, menu modules, libraries) using 11g forms developer or use the batch mode compiler.
Address the obsolete triggers (KEY-NEXT-ITEM for eg)
Port the compiled forms & other modules to your weblogic server
Please note, if your environment is totally windows based, you may not recompile the form modules once again at weblogic server end. On the other hand if you are developing modules on windows environment and later porting them to Weblogic server hosted in a linux environment, you must recompile the modules once again
Idiot proof notice: Always keep multiple backups for your source files!, You cannot port 6i applications compiled using Developer 10g suite to Weblogic server which has 11g developer suite components and expect the .fmx files to load
Okay, we are moving from Client/Server architecture to Weblogic+Developer 11g. One of the major requirements was to design and deploy a menu, which resembles Oracle application navigator.
We managed to design a menu, using LIST item (tlist) manipulation and the complete solution you can download from following link
Moving from client server architecture to R12 based domains could be quite challenging for Oracle developers, especially those who have spent years, enjoying the flexibility of testing forms modules from the local development machines prior moving the “working” modules to the production instances.
Let us see the general development scenario for R12 instances.
From 10g forms, connect to database
open TEMPLATE.fmb and save as “XXMYFORM” etc
Then keep on adding the elements
Now, move the form module to $AU_TOP/forms/US and compile it to respective application repositories
Create form, menu items…
A long list and the most frustrating is keeping on FTP the slightly modified forms module to the R12 instance to compile and testing.
We have came across a quick resolution for this PIA(Pain in the ASS) approach (for forms modules which do not use folder views) by using developer 6i (Uhu, beware Oracle fan boys would tell you, Oracle does not support developer 6i any further)
Create a template.fmb using Developer 6i forms
Change the system coordinates to use inches in the place of points
Save the template.fmb
Using save as, save your template.fmb as a new fmb file (eg: aa.fmb)
Connect to apps database instance and start adding windows, canvases, blocks etc to the form and TEST IT locally!!!
TEST it until the results are as expected.
Make a backup for your working module (copy aa.fmb to bb.fmb for example)
Open your aa.fmb file, developed using forms 6i with Developer suite 10g forms designer (You will get prompts stating the possible conversions for triggers, coding etc)
Open TEMPLATE.fmb and save it as “MYAPPSFORM.fmb”
Now, please give maximum attention towards copying the objects from your 6i module which is opened with Developer 10g forms, TO your form module which will go to apps instance
Copy all the windows you have created with 6i module to 10g forms
Copy all the canvases you have created with 6i module to 10g forms
Copy all the blocks you have created with 6i module to 10g forms
Copy record groups, lovs, form level triggers if any
Now, try to compile the 10g form. If you have copied everything from 6i, this new form shouldn’t give you any compilation errors.
Move the form to apps instance, compile, create forms, menus and do final testing, confirming everything is working fine.
We just came across a peculiar situation. Recently we had developed a new approach towards developing new applications for Oracle EBS instance.
We do the following
Develop the prototype using developer 6i forms (hacked and patched for Windows 7 & Windows 8). The only change we make with the developer 6i is changing the “coordinate system” property from points to “inches”
This approach gives us rapid development scenarios, as we don’t have to upload the form module to instance top and compile it and try it against the TEST instances.
All we are doing is, once the complete application is tested on developer 6i, a copy of the same opened with Developer 10g forms, and copying the objects following the following sequence
Window( s )
Canvases
Blocks
Procedures & functions
Parameters (if any)
Once mapping the PARAMETERS with PROFILE values, the form is ready for APPS instance testing (99% of the times everything is already tested, so a failure is seldom experienced)
Now, coming to one actual issue we are still struggling with is, using the :PARAMETER.xyz, :PARAMETER.abc as initial values for block elements.
The hacked developer 6i does not populate the initial value from :PARAMETER.xyz or :PARAMETER.abc during run time. ie, the first record (record orientation: forms) will not show the already populated values for the columns, however, the very next record(a delete does it) starts showing the :PARAMETER.xyz, abc values being populated to columns wherever they are set as initial values!!!
Do you have solutions? Please let us know with the comment section
Update 19.11.2012
With developer forms 6i, we loaded the values to column through the WHEN-NEW-FORM-INSTANCE like following
A lot of happy news for Oracle enthusiasts! You can even install Oracle Developer Suite 6i following the same trick we provided for Windows 7. Please refer the attached images
We are @ the final stage of implementing Oracle e-business suit 12 and recently came across a peculiar font mapping problem with custom developed reports. We use both Developer 6i reports developer as well as 10g reports developer.
Once the reports are tested and uploaded to the apps instance, the outputs were always producing gibrish (PDF outputs especially). However after few days of experimenting, finally we found a work around (hopefully)!
Following are the tips:
Design your report, test it.
Do not change the default font until your report is ready to upload to the instance.
Now decide the actual font you need to use with your final report.
And never select the font from the font list drop down, check the image:
Instead click on format menu item, select “font” and choose your font. Generally we use Courier New or Times New Roman (Western) for our reports and this method has solved our months long troubles with the reports. Please check the attached image:
When you need to change the font sizing and weight for individual items, follow the same method and once you are satisfied with the layout upload to the apps instance.
We hope this work around is helpful for few out there.
Just came across an issue while trying to install Developer 6i suite on Windows 7 64 bit (may apply to 32bi as well), came across following error “forms60.vrf(78):OS_ERROR while getting value Path”. Didn’t have a clue what was wrong as we were able to install Developer Suite 6i more than multiple times (for legacy application used across corporate)
Googling around brought us to this link and found the solution! It was related the path element length, by removing some “unwanted” entries from the path string, we were able to successfully install the Suite.
Including me, many of you out there must be still using the developer 6i and getting this stuff work under Windows 7 64bit environment could be quite tricky.
Run the installer normally (without changing the compatibility mode) and finish the installation for both forms and reports. Go to this link and download the files suggested.
Now go to your developer installation folder, browse to BIN directory and make backups for these files
NN60.DLL
NNB60.DLL
Now copy the extracted files from the downloads you already have, to \BIN directory. This should deal with forms developer not responding to the “Run” button click or ‘Ctrl+R’ shortcut key.
