Configuring BIDI / Arabic / Hebrew Reports in 11g R2 – REP-56048: Engine rwEng-0 crashed

Recently I have been getting MANY frustrated inquiries regarding how to properly configure Hebrew / Arabic / BIDI reports for Forms/Reports 11g R2.

In general I get 2 types of errors from customers when running with Hebrew reports:

Firstly,  instead of seeing Hebrew / Arabic characters when a report is run they see various symbols @#!$%^&*.  When this happens most people decide to replace the uifont.ali file that comes with Reports 11g R2 with the uifont.ali file that supported BIDI characters from 10g systems. Once they do this replacement they get the second error which is error message REP-56048: Engine rwEng-0 crashed and the report server crashes when they run a Report containing Hebrew characters.

After see many SR’s on the subject I decided I would write a handy whitepaper for you all on how to configure Hebrew reports on 11g R2 with ease.

The guide to Hebrew reports for Windows can be downloaded here

I know developers have been getting similar errors running Arabic reports so this may help them as well. If it works for Arabic please let me know in the comments section. Thanks

FRM-92095 Error with Oracle Forms on Apple Mac Safari after JRE update

Since many readers have been commenting on my blog about having JRE problems on Mac Os X and Safari. I decided to try and help BUT to give full disclosure I do not own a Mac so I have not actually tested the tips in this note. I wanted to give you all some direction with the hopes that it will help. So I’d appreciate any feedback if I got it wrong and I’ll do a follow up post.

The Mac Support note that is the most helpful can be found here:
How to re-enable the Apple-provided Java SE 6 applet plug-in and Web Start functionality

For ERP Oracle EBS users the note to solve the issue can be found here:

How to Reenable Apple Java 6 Plug-in for Mac EBS Users

In addition, I found this note on Oracle Support Cannot Access Forms on Apple Mac after updating JRE to 1.6.0_33 [ID 1473672.1] which sheds some light on the subject although it seems most people have errors currently with a higher version of the JRE.

Macs are pretty aggressive when it comes to java. It seems that if the Java version does not meet the criteria for the minimum safe version, Java is updated daily, as needed. It seems Apple intentionally blocks Safari from running older java code for fear of  virus.

I hope this sheds some light on the subject.

Oracle Forms is Alive and Kicking! Oracle Forms Modernization Day

This past Tuesday, I had the privilege of running the Oracle Forms user group conference. It all started when Grant Ronald (Oracle Forms and JDeveloper product manager) and I got to talking at Open World 2011. We were saying how Oracle Forms developers are a huge community but  the forgotten people. Every Oracle conference of recent years has been filled with sessions on ADF, SOA, APEX, BPEL and all other 3 letter curse words (OOPS  I mean buzz words). But for the past few years Forms has dropped off the “session titles” map.

Well we decided then and there to make a conference specifically geared to the Oracle Forms developers community. With the help of Eyal Shani, CTO of Oracle Israel and Ami Aharonovitch, head of the Israel Oracle User Group (our heroes), we set out to prove that the Forms development community is a force to be reckoned with.

And rest assured, there were plenty of nay sayers:  “No one still develops in forms”,  “You won’t get more than 50 people” – Sound familiar? Well, this Tuesday, I got to say those three precious words: “TOLD YOU SO! ” With nearly 200  developers who attended, the event was a rousing success.

Oracle Forms Developer Poll 2012

In gearing up for the Oracle Developer Conference on Jan 24 , I wanted to do a quick poll to see what version Oracle Forms Developers are currently using and if they are more interested in upgrading or migrating.

This poll also follows my  fellow forms consultants in Europe who conducted similar polls this year. The tradition it seems was started by Gerd Volberg  in his talk2Gerd blog http://talk2gerd.blogspot.com/2011/08/result-of-2011-oracle-forms-poll-part-1.html where he conducted a Oracle Forms users poll in Germany.  Since then others have followed http://blog.whitehorses.nl/oracle-forms-usage-survey/ and I thought I’d join in too.

The results were surprising and comforting to Forms developers who think they are the only ones who have yet to migrate.  Nearly 40% of all respondents were working with the good old Forms 6i Client/Server! Meaning nearly half the 1000 respondents were not even running forms in a browser!   Most sites said they will upgrade their Forms environment in the (near) future, however over 60% are not even considering to replacing Forms with newer technologies.

Oracle Forms Modernization – The Future of Oracle Forms is …. Forms !

This was a great week!

For the past 5 years, almost on a daily basis, I have had to explain to my Oracle Forms customers that Oracle Forms is not really dead just “Mature” and Oracle intends to keep it around for a long time. All the while quietly praying that Oracle doesn’t make a liar out of me in 2 years. Although the official message from Oracle was forms is not dead the word on the street seemed to be that Oracle Forms Modernization was a code word for migration to java. Even as new versions of Forms were released I heard more about the options for migrating Oracle Forms to APEX, ADF or Java.
Although the future of Oracle Forms seemed uncertain at best, for years I have been helping my clients secure their huge investments in Oracle Forms by stretching their legacy forms applications to the limit.

Oracle RUEI for Oracle Forms 11g R2 : The good, the not so bad, and less ugly than before

I was VERY happy to get feedback from Jurgen de Leijer product management director, responsible for Oracle Real User experience Insight (RUEI) on my post  “Oracle Forms 11g R 2 RUEI – Real User Experience Insight – The Good The Bad and The Ugly”. He was (not surprisingly) less than happy about my bad and ugly sections and gave some great feedback and information on RUEI. It was so great in fact that I decided to write this follow up, mini retraction and request for further clarification.

Jurgen starts by saying that

“RUEI is not a part of Oracle Forms 11R2 but part of the Application Performance Management features of Enterprise Manager.”

Fixing running Oracle Reports from a menu item in Forms during upgrade

You may find that when you upgrade your forms application from client server. The reports you have that are run from the menu bar have stopped working. This is due to the change from using RUN_PRODUCT to using the RUN_REPORT_OBJECT() built-in.

In order to use the RUN_REPORT_OBJECT() built-in you need to have a report object in the form from which you want to call the report. If you need to add a report object across the board you can checkout some past posts for how to do form manipulations in patch either using JDAPI or Form to XML functionality. Full details of the solution is found in the below document.

 

Reports_menu_from_Forms.zip

More code snippets: JDAPI: change Font for all Items, Prompts, Boilerplates, Frames

Its me again with more code samples to help batch upgrade for your application.

If my previous posts of how to convert the system to XML pages to then do manipulations in notepad was not for you. This is a different route to solve the same problems. Here is sample code of a java api that can manipulate forms in batch and change the font for all items.

Font_change_JDAPI.zip

NOTE:219168.1 – How To Change Fonts For All Items in a Form Module using JDAPI

Metalink is full of these little gems if you know where to look.

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We’ve got many more code snippets & tricks coming up!

Getting the Browser Window under control when separateFrame=True

To follow up with my post about closing the parent browser while running forms on the web I will share a few more tricks on how to control the browser window when running forms in separate frame mode.

These notes all basically use javascript to manipulate or minimize the effect the browser window has on the user.Attached is a great script on how to permanently minimize the browser window using javascipt and the below note can be found on Metalink:

Note 259786.1 Using Java To Manipulate The External Forms Frame For Application Running In separateFrame Mode

Minimize_Window.zip

Oracle Forms 11g R 2 RUEI – Real User Experience Insight – The Good The Bad and The Ugly

So I have been asked to evaluate a new feature of Oracle Forms 11g R2  called Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) by one of my clients.  Since I didn’t find much to go on I thought I’d share my findings with the Oracle Forms community.

Oracle Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) support is a new feature of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g R2 that supposedly provides non-intrusive Oracle Forms system monitoring. In the newest version of Oracle Forms the Oracle development team have provided new arguments to the forms MESSAGE built-in, and environment to allow application developers to define their own messages to communicate with the RUEI server.

While on the surface this sounded great. What form users have not looked for a monitoring solution in the past 5 years. I set out to investigate what exactly this means for forms users and report my findings in this post called  “The good the bad and the ugly”.