New Layout

I updated the templates a little bit of my talk2gerd. These are the new features:

Followers

- all followers of my blog are welcome here

Labels

- here you can see all the different labels I used in my blog. Click on a label and you see only the postings with that label on it.

have fun
Gerd

New Statement of Direction, May 2010

This is the new Statement of Direction from May 2010. (My last SoD-Post)



Here are some links to older Statement of Directions:

SoD Oracle Fusion 2010 / 05
SoD Forms 2009 / 07
SoD Forms 2008 / 07
SoD Forms 2007 / 11
SoD Forms 2005 / 09
SoD Forms 2005 / 05
SoD Forms 2005 / 03
SoD Forms 2004 / 06

I just submitted "Forms 11g and the iPhone" for the DOAG Conference 2010

In some weeks the Call for Papers for the German Oracle User Group (DOAG) Conference 2010 ends.

My plan is to hold a presentation about Forms 11g and the iPhone.

The main topic of the presentation is, how you can extract modules from big Oracle Forms Applications and recreate them in a mobile version on the iPhone.

The presentation-testcase shows, how much more efficient it is to have a time-reporting on your mobile device versus the old technique, where this app was part of a big legacy application.

Another topic is to show, how you can communicate bidirectional between Forms 11g and the iPhone App. Using Advanced Queueing in Forms and Push Notifications in the App is the solution.

5 months to go and I hope I get a slot in the conference.
Gerd

Migrate your charset to UTF8, annotation to step 3

After migrating to UTF8 you may have problems with your report-server. This is, when your reports cannot be displayed and internally the server throws a "Canceled as server is shutting down"

With UTF8 you need a bigger cache-size in "report server-parameter". Easiest way, when you run into problems, double up the value of the parameter.

Try it
Gerd


Back to part 3 of the article

Migrate your charset to UTF8, step 3

Applications without Reports are useless :-)

So we have to change some things in the Reports Environment to enable UTF8 in PDF-Output.

First

you have to edit in your OAS Report-Server the report-config:




Add one "environment id" per section. A section is in this example development, test and production. After that, each section has defined it's own NLS_LANG and report-path.

Second

You can use the new sections through Forms. Before starting the report you add another parameter to the paramlist:

Add_Parameter (V_ParamListe, 'ENVID', TEXT_PARAMETER, 'NLS-PROD');

Now you can control the NLS_LANG of your reportserver.


Third

Last checkpoint for your reports is the correct mapping between your fonts and your TrueType-Fonts (in this case we have a windows-system)

Edit the file "uifont.ali" in the directory \tools\common and add the following lines in the section [ PDF:Subset ]

Arial..Italic.Bold..             = "c:\windows\fonts\arialbi.ttf"
Arial...Bold..                   = "c:\windows\fonts\arialbd.ttf"
Arial..Italic...                 = "c:\windows\fonts\ariali.ttf"
Arial.....                       = "c:\windows\fonts\arial.ttf"

"Courier New"..Italic.Bold..     = "c:\windows\fonts\courbi.ttf"
"Courier New"...Bold..           = "c:\windows\fonts\courbd.ttf"
"Courier New"..Italic...         = "c:\windows\fonts\couri.ttf"
"Courier New"                    = "c:\windows\fonts\cour.ttf"

"Times New Roman"..Italic.Bold.. = "c:\windows\fonts\timesbi.ttf"
"Times New Roman"...Bold..       = "c:\windows\fonts\timesbd.ttf"
"Times New Roman"..Italic...     = "c:\windows\fonts\timesi.ttf"
"Times New Roman"                = "c:\windows\fonts\times.ttf"

In this example windows has its fonts in the directory c:\windows\fonts\

have fun
Gerd

To be continued with Migrate your charset to UTF8, annotation to step 3

Back to part 2 of the article

Migrate your charset to UTF8, step 2

Now, after changing the NLS to UTF8 we may have problems with hotkeys.

That's because the nls-change to UTF8 will now use a different resource-file. Instead of fmrweb.res the fmrweb_utf8.res is used. The resource-files are located in the forms-home-directory.

If you have used "term" in your formsweb.cfg - otherparams, then you point hardcoded to a specified file. Here you have to change the value of the parameter or you have to exchange the content of the file.

e.g. changing the value of the parameter:
old: otherParams=term=\fmrweb.res
new: otherParams=term=\fmrweb_utf8.res

After this changes you can use the same hotkeys like before


To be continued with Migrate your charset to UTF8, step 3

Back to part 1 of the article

Migrate your charset to UTF8 in 3 steps

What do we have to do in your forms application, when the database in the backend is upgraded from a single-byte charset to a UTF8-charset.

First Step

Make a backup of your forms-sources, your local forms installation and your application server configs.

After that change the NLS_LANG in your registry. You can create a backup of the parameter, through creating a new parameter named "NLS_old" with the value of the old NLS_LANG-value. The new value of NLS_LANG is for example "GERMAN_GERMANY.UTF8". This change is for your local forms builder, when you recompile your forms sources.

Now we can edit our local default.env. If there is a line with the NLS_LANG, then change the value to the UTF8-value (see above) or create a new line with the NLS_LANG. This change is for our local OC4J instance only.

Do the same change on the application server (use the OEM for edits)

These changes were the basic environment-changes we need for UTF8.


To be continued with Migrate your charset to UTF8, step 2

The iPhone Developer Conference was great

The last two days, when I visited the conference, I got tons of new infos and ideas around the iPhone and how to create applications on it.



I think, I'll create a showcase for iPhones, where you can manipulate data through an App and parallel you see those updates automatically in a forms application. Using the newest version Forms 11 with AQ's is the basis of the showcase.

Gerd

iPhone Developer Conference in Cologne

Tomorrow starts the german's iPhone Developer Conference in Cologne.

I'll have a close look, if this is the new way of creating apps. And maybe I create the first app which can interact with Oracle Forms :-)

Let's see
Gerd

Blogging via Google Wave - First Test through email

Google wave is cool. Each day I find new things in this platform.

And now is the time to test the connectivity between google wave and my blog.

In this first test I write an automated email to the blogger-account. And the second test afterwards is from within the wave

I need luck
Gerd

The presentation for the DOAG conference 2009 is finished

The title is: "Shout out: Oracle Designer vs. SQL Developer Data Modeler".

I'll demonstrate in the presentation the advantages and disadvantages of both tools. I base the demonstration on an EMP / DEPT example, which I design live.

Chapters of the white paper are

- Domains
- ER-Design
- Transfer ER to DataModel
- Data Modeling
- Generating DDL-Scripts
- Reverse Engineering
- Guaranteed Future

The day after the presentation I'll upload the paper to my download-portal on google-code

Gerd

Forms Debugger - hidden Feature

The Forms 10g debugger is much better than the Forms 6i debugger. He is completly new written and has the ability to debug remote. So you can look into a running session of an user and search for errors. This is in the new web-environments a powerful method to find problems.

And that's only one aspect of the new debugger.


The debugger works in two different modes: The stop-mode is well-known, because you can use there all functions of the debugger. He is active, while you investigate the code. You can work in this work, through a breakpoint e.g.


The run-mode is the other one. He can be found only, while the form is running in the foreground.


And at that point you can press the break-button, which is one of the most interesting features in the debugger. It creates a breakpoint dynamically in the next line of code, which will be executed.

So, if you press the button, nothing happens. If you then return from the Forms Builder back to the runform, the next event in the form starts the debugging-process. And then the debugger shows you the first line of code in that trigger, which will be executed next. So you don't have to think to much, where to set breakpoints and so on... just use the break-button.

That's my tip of the day
Gerd

Forms 11g is available on OTN

Go to Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and click on Downloads


In the list of available tools, search for "Portal, Forms, Reports and Discoverer"



then relax, while downloading 2.1 GB and enjoy the new Oracle Forms 11g R1.

Available on Windows and Linux. Solaris, HP and IBM is "Coming soon"
Have fun
Gerd

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g launched

Charles Phillips launched the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g two days ago in Washington D.C.

So now the Fusion stack is out and more and more products can use the new middleware. That is a good info for us, where we were waiting for the new platform for our Forms 11g.

Charles Phillips spoke about Key Partners, which helped him during the development of Fusion with beta testing and trainings. And here are two images from his presentation where we found our OPITZ CONSULTING logo on his main presentations:

Let's hope, that Forms 11g is launched in the next weeks
Gerd

Disabling a Trigger

If you have a trigger and you want to quickly disable him, then just use the "_"-technique :



In this case we have a Key-Create-Record-Trigger which should be disabled. Rename the "-" to "_" in the name of the trigger and from that point on the trigger is a user-named-trigger, which won't fire through an event.



Important: You can't rename the trigger to "KEY-CREREC2" or something else. The hyphen is in forms reserved for event-triggers.

To activate the trigger rename it back to "-" and that's all.

Have fun
Gerd