Have you recently upgraded from Oracle E-Business R11 to R12 and find yourself unable to launch APEX from the responsibility menu?

By Andrew Archibald, Senior Consultant for Rocela

With many of our customers upgrading their Oracle E-Business Suite from R11 to R12, some have found an issue with launching APEX applications from the custom responsibilities. When users select the ‘responsibility’ to launch and log them into APEX they come across a ‘page cannot be displayed’ error.

So what’s happened to cause this?

Well, Oracle have decided to stop supporting launching mod/plsql functions in R12 which means the nice and easy way of integrating APEX with Oracle E-Business is currently ‘out the window’.  You now have to launch APEX using another method – the recommended process being using a JSP page.

How do we fix this?

First off there is a great Oracle white paper written by Rod West ,
The Fast Way to Extend the Oracle E-Business Suite, for R12.1.2 or lower which details how to integrate APEX with Oracle E-Business Suite both R11 and R12. This document is fantastic if you are starting from scratch and will get you up and running in no time (please check out this post though).

For release R12.1.3, a new document was released; Extending Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 using Oracle Application Express where Oracle have supplied a JSP as part of the install which you can use to launch your APEX applications.

So why is this an issue?

The problem is losing all your hard work of integrating APEX with Oracle E-Business Suite for R11.  Setting up your own redirections to the correct page or using your own custom cookies are only a few of the custom developments you might have completed.

The JSP page is simple and will allow you to redirect to APEX.  This is wonderful as you can still integrate APEX with Oracle E-Business Suite but with a couple of simple changes, you can keep all your existing code and only have to change setup marginally.

What do you need to do?

First off for all versions of R12 you need to use the JSP page and have followed all the steps in the white paper The Fast Way to Extend the Oracle E-Business Suite . The section you need to change is ‘the building of the url’. This is to allow for the form function to pass the name of the publically accessible procedure created in R11 to launch APEX.

Replace the existing section in the JSP page to the code below. The code is taking the value passed in the parameter and also fetching the profile option value for the APEX url.

<%
String p_params = request.getParameter(“params”);
p_params = (p_params==null ? “” : p_params);
AppsEnvironmentStore m_env = (AppsEnvironmentStore) ctx.getEnvStore();
try {
String l_launcher = ctx.getProfileStore().getProfile(“APEX_HTTP_SERVER”);
l_launcher = l_launcher + “/” + p_params;
%>

Next, the form function needs to change, so instead of calling the publically accessible procedure in the HTML, call the section of the form function you will pass in LaunchApex.jsp, change the properties to SSWA JSP function and then in the parameters section enter params=apps.MYAPEXLAUNCHPROCEDURE

Conclusion

With Oracle R12, a new step has been added into integrating APEX with Oracle E-Business Suite but hopefully this step will now provide little trouble and allow you to keep on developing great APEX applications.