So I have this source code of a software which is probably developed in oracle.
Can anybody tell me how can I turn this into an actual software?
I am a newbie.
Screenshot
Those are Oracle Forms (.fmx) and Reports (.rep) executables, as well as a Menu module (.mmx). In order to run them, you'd first have to know which Oracle Developer Suite version it is; might be anything from at least 4.5 over 6i/9i/10g or even later; who knows, they all share same extensions.
Forms up to 6i are client-server; later versions are web-based so you'd have to install IAS (Internet Application Server) or WebLogic server; none of those installations is trivial so - if you can't even recognize what you have, you'd rather not do that on your own - consider hiring a consultant.
Once you manage to set it up, you'd run the .mmx file as it looks as the menu for that application.
However, it's not that simple - in order to run such an application, you have to establish connection to the database, i.e. a schema that contains tables used by this application. There's the "Database" folder - maybe it contains some more useful info, perhaps export file (.dmp), maybe even .dbf files ... can't tell just by looking at the icon.
It might be enough if all tables are owned by the same user; otherwise, application might fail because of missing dependencies.
Finally, I think that your best option is to find out someone who actually knows what it is, which development software was used to create those forms & reports and then see if something can be done. It would be simpler/easier if you had .fmb and .rdf (or .jsp) files instead of executables as you could edit them.
Related
a little background, I really don't know any technical terms from Oracle. My company have a pre built machine and I'm trying not having to go there backup my files and lose a day of job because I cant.
Recently I'm learning how to use Oracle Designer (6i) to build a diagram and later a table so I can request it to be created... While using the software it requested to install some file for the repository... after doing it, It screwed up every Oracle product I was using... I couldn't connect to PLSQL or even the designer...
After fixing some registry to point to the right TNSNAME and manually adjusting PLSQL, I managed to access both. The problem in hand is in oracle Designer at the "Designer Editor", when I right click a table and select generate, the message bellow shows up
Message
-------
CDD-23564: The file "C:\ORACLE\DSG6I\BIN\cds61.dll" could not be loaded or does not exist.
Cause
-----
The specified file or one its dependent files could not be loaded.
This may be because a file has not been installed, or is not
correctly defined in the system registry.
As an example dependency, the Forms Generator files require the
Form Builder files installed as part of Developer.
Action
------
Check the registry settings for the location of the required
file. Also check the product and any required dependencies
e.g.Developer have been installed correctly.
If necessary, try reinstalling.
The dll mentioned IS and EXISTS on the mentioned folder.
Considering I don't have the Oracle Developer 6i intaller, what can I do? What registry entry should I update?
Designer 6 is long out of support. Oracle has a free tool, SQL Developer Data Model, which does not break.
Even Designer 9i was flaky and would crash at random intervals and poke along with larger schemas. Anything over hundred tables could take days to edit. Ah, good times...
I managed to fix the problem by copying and replacing the whole ORACLE_HOME\DSG6I folder (in my case c:\Oracle\DSG6I, for those confused in terms like me) and the oracle system registry (regedit > HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Oracle) from a coworker machine!
I'm developing a ADF Fusion Web Application in JDeveloper 12. After the creation of the project I took a look at the file system and a bunch of directories were created.
Can anyone tell me what the .adf folder is good for? I can't find anything about it in the Oracle Docs. I'm developing with git and I'd like to know if I have to version this directory, too.
Thanks in advance!
Inside the above mentioned folder can be found two files: adf-config.xml and connections.xml. For an overview of their usage you can take a look at these links:
Oracle ADF XML File Appendix and Web Center. In both of them it states that there are stored application-level setting during design time, which can be used later during the deployment process (it seems quite important though :) ). So, even if you delete that folder it should be recreated if you make any changes and redeploy the application, BUT, if it is there it means it should be there (typical Oracle politics ;) ). So even if you are really in need of their settings (such as modify connection details to point to production server instances) it should be versioned as well.
I'm using svn, and it does version it automatically.
Hope this helps.
ADF creates several files and folders that are needed by the project.
It creates them when the project uses a functionality that needs those files.
In .adf/META-INF/ you can find adf-config.xml & connections.xml which are Application Level Settings.
But for example src/META-INF/jazn-data.xml doesn't exist until you enable Security on your application. This file is also needed and should be on SVN/Git.
ADF also creates some temporary files and folders that shouldn't be on Git/SVN.
Like: .data/.
Depending on what technologies you use from the ADF stack (ADF BC, ADF Model, ADF Controller, ADF Faces), you should understand what files and folders are created.
If you have searched for .adf/ in the official Documentation you would have found your answers.
ADF by default creates .adf and .data file, .adf file you can say is for holding various info related to your workspace in IDE i.e the connections that its having with Database, META-INF info used for customization purpose.
& .data support your MDS functionality.
we can always delete it but our Jdev will create it automatically, whenever we rebuild our application.
Our application is deployed to the target machine with an msi file. All works nicely. Our tester has gone through his plan, and one of the tests requires deleting the application's configuration file. The application is designed to alert the user with a dialog on startup saying "missing config". However, what happens is that - somehow! - the software starts the installer again and retrieves the missing file from the msi! Which is nice, but not what we want. How do we disable that behaviour?
without going into much depth of the windows installer mechanics (if you interested in that there a plenty of articles about this), the shortcut of the software is probably advertised, which means the windows installer checks if everything is in its place before the software is started.
if you can edit the msi, make the shortcut non advertised.
if you can't, install it with DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS
e.g. msiexec /i myMsi.msi DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS=1
please note that this is only a quick (and dirty) workaround,
to fix this proper you need to understand the whole windows installer advertising (also called repair or self resiliency) mechanism.
but explaining all the causes and the mechanism of the repair is far beyond this answer and there are quite some articles and posts about that on the internet (and especially on MSDN and stackoverflow)
There is a more correct answer to this, and it is NOT DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS. You set the component id to null in the MSI file to prevent repair of that individual file. See ComponentId comments here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368007(v=vs.85).aspx
Edit the MSI file with Orca to delete the Componenty ID, and write an uninstall custom action to delete the file at uninstall if it's there.
In addition, that's a redundant test. Windows will restore that file for you if it's missing, so the idea that you need a test to notify that it's missing is pointless. The true test should be that Windows will restore the file if it's lost, and your app needs to do potentially nothing about the missing file.
You don't mention what tool you are using to make your MSI but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess Visual Studio Deployment Projects (.VDRPOJ).
One of the (many) horrible things about this tool was that it fails to expose the foundational concept of components. Instead it makes every file a key file of it's own component and hides the existence of the component from you. I say 'was' because Microsoft killed this project type in VS. There are around 50k people complaining on UserVoice to bring this tool back and I'm guessing that 49,990 of them don't know what a key path is.
Windows Installer has a concept called the component rules and each component has a keypath. The keypath teaches MSI how to handle repair scenarios. But your tool has to allow you to be able to control this to make it work.
Windows Installer is functioning exactly the way it's supposed to function. You just aren't up to speed on what that is.
However, if you want to ignore Windows Installer best practices and continue using the tool you use today, the trick is to install the app.config file as a different file. Then have the application copy the file to the real file name on run. Windows Installer won't service what it didn't install.
Several answers have been provided that can work:
You can install the file with a blank guid. Then you need to remove it on uninstall using the RemoveFile feature. You will also run into issues if you want to replace it during an upgrade. Could be tricky at times.
You can disable the advertised shortcut(s), but this affects too much in my opinion.
Finally you can use my suggestion to install a separate non-advertised shortcut to use to launch the application. Such a shortcut bypasses the self-repair check. It may still be invoked by other means such as missing file associations, COM registration or similar, but those are exception states.
However, my preference is that an application can start without a config file present, if at all possible. I always suggest a good startup routine with "internal defaults" available. The startup routine should also degrade gracefully if faced with any file system access denied conditions.
Most importantly you should place this config file in the userprofile so you can generate the file on first launch for the user in question. It can even be copied from a read-only copy in the main installation directory.
When you generate a file from internal defaults and put it in a userprofile location, the file will have no interference with Windows Installer at all. The issues that results is how to clean up user data on uninstall. I discussed this with Stefan Kruger (MSI MVP) at one point, and I agree with his notion that user data is indeed user data and should not be automatically dealt with by your installer at all. Leave it installed, and clean it up via system administrator tools if necessary - for example logon scripts.
I've just implemented build and deploy process which consists of java files, ant script and cmd files. In the process, a release manager will have to check out source, hit the build.cmd button and then carry a zip file over to a server.
I am wondering if it is worthwhile to make a GUI for it? So that the release manager does not need to check out source manually for example?
How do I start? I have quite limited knowledge of javax, but I very much like to learn.
Thanks,
Sarah
This sounds like something that could be handled by Hudson. It can check out source, run Ant scripts, etc., saving you the trouble of maintaining a GUI. I'd give that a shot before rolling your own.
I have helped develop the build process at my current company. The way we currently do it is with a script file. It checks out the latest code from the stable branch of our repository, performs some steps to get some data from a database (such as static SQL data that needs to be loaded at deployment), then compresses everything. The file is then distributed to our production servers and then the setup routine is executed. Everything is automatic and the script is written in Python. Python is great for these types of things because of the sheer number of libraries it has to help the developer.
Perhaps it may be useful to build a GUI for your deployment procedure -- typically this would be useful if the deployment requires user interaction to make decisions, such as "Which server shall I deploy to?", etc. But, if it's just a matter of doing things automatically, then a script file's the way to go. Choose your favourite language and dive in -- I of course recommend Python.
If you'd like to learn how to make a simple GUI in Java (since that seems to be what your company is familiar with), you should check out the stuff at this site:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/index.html
I learned everything I know about Java from that site. The section on GUI programming is great.
Best of luck!
Shad
I'm working in a multi-developer environment in Oracle with a large package. We have a DEV => TST => PRD promotion pattern. Currently, all package edits are made directly in TOAD and then compiled into the DEV package.
We run into two problems:
Concurrent changes need to be promoted on different schedules. For instance, developer A makes a change that needs to be promoted tomorrow while developer B is concurrently working on a change that won't be promoted for another two weeks. When it comes promotion time, we find ourselves manually commenting out stuff that isn't being promoted yet and then uncommenting it afterwards...yuck!!!
If two developers are making changes at the same exact time and one of them compiles, it wipes out the other developer's changes. There isn't a nice merge; instead the latest compile wins.
What strategies would you recommend to get around this? We are using TFS for our source-control but haven't yet utilized this with our Oracle packages.
P.S. I've seen this posting, but it doesn't fully answer my question.
The key is to adopt a practice of only deploying code from the source control system. I'm not familiar with TSF, but it must implement the concepts of branches, tags, etc. The question of what to deploy then falls out of the build and release tagging in the source control system.
Additional tips (for Oracle):
it works best if you split the package spec and body into different files that use a consistent file pattern for each (e.g. ".pks" for package spec, and ".pkb" for package body). If you use an automated build process that can process file patterns then you can build all of the specs and then the bodies. This also minimizes object invalidations if you are only deploying a package body.
put the time in to configure an automated build process that is driven from a release or build state of your source control system. If you have even a moderate number of db code objects it will pay to be able to build the code into a reference system and compare it to your qa or production system.
See my answer about Tools to work with stored procedures in Oracle, in a team (which I have just retagged).
Bottom line : don't modify procedures directly with TOAD. Store the source as files, that you will store in source control, modify then execute.
Plus, I would highly recommend that each developer works on its own copy of the database (use Oracle Express, which is free). You can do that if you store all the scripts to create the database in source control. More insight can be found here.
To avoid 2 developers working on the same package at the same time:
1) Use your version control system as the source of the package code. To work on a package, the developer must first check out the package from version control; nobody else can check the package out until this developer checks it back in.
2) Don't work directly on the package code in Toad or any other IDE. You have no clue whether the code you are working on there is correct or has been modified by one or more other developers. Work on the code in the script you have checked out from version control, and run that into the database to compile the package. My preference is to use a nice text editor (TextPad) and SQL Plus, but you can do this in Toad too.
3) When you have finished, check the script back into version control. Do not copy and paste code out of the database into your script (see point 2 again).
The downside (if it is one) of this controlled approach is that only one developer at a time can work on a package. This shouldn't be a major problem as long as:
You keep packages down to a reasonable size (in terms of WHAT they do, not how many lines of code or number of procedures in them). Don't have one big package that holds all the code.
Developers are encouraged to check out code only when ready to work on it, and to check it back in as soon as they have finished making and testing their changes.
We use Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio.NET...plugs right into TFS
we do it with a Dev database for every stream, and labels for the different streams.
Our Oracle licensing gives us unlimited dev/test instances, but we are an ISV, you may have a different licensing option
You can use the Oracle developer tools for VS or you can use sql developer. SQL developer integrates with Subversion and CVS and you can download it for free. See here: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/sql_developer/files/what_is_sqldev.html
We use Toad for Oracle with the TFS MSSCCI provider against TFS 2008. We use a Custom Tool that pulls database checkins from source control and packages them for release.
To my knowledge Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio.Net doesn't have any real source control integration with TFS or otherwise.
You might consider Toad Extensions for Visual Studio though it's not cheap, maybe $4k I think.
Another option is the Oracle Change Management Pack but believe it requires the Enterprise edition of Oracle which is much more pricey.
You may be interested in Gitora www.gitora.com. It helps managing Oracle database objects with Git.
This article about collaborative development with the Oracle database can also be helpful: http://blog.gitora.com/plsql-how-to-develop-two-features-simultaneously-but-deploy-only-one/
Full disclosure: I am the developer and author of the article.