Apply APEX 4.1.1 Patch Set

Yesterday APEX 4.1.1 Patch set was made public. If you already have APEX 4.1 installed you can download patch number 13331096 from My Oracle Support.

If you are on a previous version of APEX you can download the complete install of APEX 4.1.1 from OTN.

I installed the patch today on my APEX 4.1 instances and it installed without a problem. It took not more than 5 minutes to complete the entire patch.

Two things to look for when you copy the images folder
- for Apache on Linux I used this command:
cp -rf patch/images /u01/ohs/apex/ (so without images folder)
- for the APEX Listener I used this command:
cp -rf patch/images/* /u01/app/glassfish3/glassfish/domain1/docroot/i (so without images folder)

When I first did the copy it included another images folder. If you go to your images folder and go into the themes folder you should find the new theme 24 folder. If you find it, than everything is copied ok.

Which brings me to; there is a new theme in APEX 4.1.1. Theme 24, the "cloudy" theme! This theme looks very nice and more 2012 (bigger fonts etc).
It would be great if Oracle would setup an official theme repository, like they did for plugins. Designing nice looking sites takes time and the web design "trends" change fast.


There was one other catch after applying the patch; some workspaces weren't accessible anymore. I got this error:

--
Workspace "" is inactive. Contact your administrator.
Contact your application administrator.
--

This was due to the way I created some of those workspaces in APEX 4.1.
Instead of going through the wizard I used the API to create the workspace:

apex_instance_admin.add_workspace(
  p_workspace_id       => v_workspace_id,
  p_workspace          => v_workspace,
  p_primary_schema     => v_primary_schema,
  p_additional_schemas => v_additional_schemas);

This worked fine before, but after applying the patch if you didn't run:

apex_instance_admin.enable_workspace('');

It doesn't work. Thanks to the APEX development team to diagnose the cause so quickly and come up with the solution. Patrick Wolf posted a script to fix any workspaces you may have with that issue.

Also don't forget to read about some possible changes of behaviour (depending compatibility setting) in the patch notes:

• Changes in Page and Region Caching
• Columns Used in Automatic Row Processing (DML) Processes

I definitely think it's good to apply this patch. I already applied some one off patches before for the urgent issues I was facing, but having this patch set brings you immediately to the latest and greatest!