Wednesday, November 22, 2006

APEX 2.2 - Manage Supporting Object

I downloaded some Packaged Application from the Application Express OTN homepage.

What are these Packaged Application?
Packaged Applications are fully functional (example) applications that you can view, use and customize. They can only be installed in APEX 2.2 or higher. If you know how it worked before (pre-APEX 2.2); this file contains everything needed to create a working application: from sql to create the tables till the actual data, files and the installation script to create the application in APEX.

What happens when importing a Packaged Application?
When you're in Application Builder - Click the Import button - Select the packaged application file and follow the wizard...
- Part 1: APEX will install the "Application" - screens etc. you see in your APEX - and
- Part 2: APEX will install the "Supporting Objects" - creation of tables, indexes, ... and the load of the data
- Part 3 and further: APEX will install css, images etc. (optional)

An example with the Aria application:
Download and install the Aria application (aria_people_search-0.9.zip): import the file (application), follow the wizard and install the application. I was surprised I got a message that not everything was installed successfully for this Aria application...
Investigation:
The application is created successfully, so part 1 went fine.
So the error must be somewhere in part 2 or further. Looking at the logs, you do this by clicking the "View Install Summary" in the "Supporting Objects" page. I saw that the load of "Seed HR Data" wasn't successful. This is the error I got: "ORA-01858: a non-numeric character was found where a numeric was expected".
This is what Joel of the APEX Dev team said when I posted my error on the APEX forum: "There is an updated version of this coming. Temporarily change your browser language to 'en' and run the installation, and it should work just fine."
So lets give it a try... you have two options:
1. to reinstall the Aria application: delete the full application with supporting objects and start over again
OR
2. as I know the supporting objects part failed, I only want to reinstall this part.
Go to your application (Aria people) - on the right hand click on "Manage Supporting Object Definitions" - Deinstall - and finally click the Install button. This will install only the supporting objects part. I tried it and yes it worked! Thanks Joel!

These Packaged Applications are really nice... Maybe some things aren't fully developed yet (it's still version 0.9), but it's nice to see some working applications.
I really look forward to the "AskTom" packaged application!

You can also make from your application a "Packaged Application"!

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