How upgrading to Apex 3.0 spoiled my weekend!

Allright, that is an exaggeration. Hugely. But it cost me some headache before I realised what was my problem.

I still had HTML DB 1.6 running and I thought it was time I upgraded to the only just released version 3.0. So I downloaded the zip-file, and followed the instructions in the manual. Those instructions include the checking of tablespaces (which I had to resize), memory settings (which were ok), running a huge script, copying images and modifying the Apache configuration files.

And as always, the venom is in the tail.
During various versions of Apex and the apache server, the location and name of the configation files (dad’s) had changed. So, there I ended up with a $ORACLE_HOME\Apache\dads.conf (yes this is Windows!), a $ORACLE_HOME\Apache\marvel.conf and a $ORACLE_HOME\Apache\apache\httpd.conf. And the manual not being too clear about which one to change.

So, I added the image path and the location struct to a few .conf files and restarted the Apache server. A page did show up, but without images or javascript. Not much use then. After checking and rechecking the paths and image alias (also known as /i/), I thought of checking the apache logfiles.

[Sat Mar 31 11:49:44 2007] [error] [client 127.0.0.1][ecid:1175248184:192.168.2.105:3268:5164:3,0]

File does not exist: c:/oracle/product/orahttp/htmldb/imageshtmldb/apex_logo.gif>


Nothing wrong eh? At second look, a slash between “images” and “htmldb” appears to be missing. Let’s recheck the dads.conf (I already found out that this was the correct file).

 Alias /i/ "C:\Oracle\product\OraHTTP\htmldb\images\"

Hhmm… looks good to me??

After trying this and that and rechecking the config files again and again, I had the idea of replacing the last backslash by a forward slash (triggered by the fact that sometimes windows paths are written down with forward slashes too in those configuration files).

 Alias /i/ "C:\Oracle\product\OraHTTP\htmldb\images/"

Restarted the apache server for the zillionth time, and lo, Apex 3.0 was up and running! My weekend was saved at last 😉