Lino Schildenfeld did some great work making Apex-Sert available for the latest Apex versions.
Read all about it on his blog:
APEX stuff in one place or get the latest version from
https://github.com/lschilde.
I installed Apex versions 20.2 and 22.2 on 21xe and 21ee VMs, and version 24.1 on a 23aiFree VM.
That all went relatively smoothly, but it did take some tinkering to get it all to work.
My findings:
- You can use ins_auto_setup.sql, which is easier to use than ins.sql. This is mentioned in the blog of course, but I missed it the first time...
- In that script, make sure to use the correct value for db_conn_string - probably the same one you use to start sqlplus.
In my case (for 21xe), I changed line 66 from "def db_conn_string localhost:1521/orcl" to "def db_conn_string localhost:1521/xepdb1".
- According to the documentation (and the install scripts), Apex-Sert does not work on XE. However, it seems to work fine on 21xe - and I would suspect on 18xe as well.
XE versions 10 and 11 were more restricted, so those may have been the reason for the exclusion in the past.
For more recent XE versions, you can disable the check in the script, e.g. like this:
Change line 172 from "if l_edition = 'XE' then 'XE'" to e.g. "if l_edition = 'XE' then 'ABC'".
Or remove the entire if-statement of course.
Or, if you want to make it extra fancy, you can rewrite the if-statement to also look at the XE version.
Note that for 23aiFree this is not a problem - l_edition is 'FREE' there.
- I got this error with both Apex 20.2 and 22.2 (seen in both 21xe and 21ee), but not with Apex 24.1:
The reason seems to be in cfg\sv_sec_compatibility_rule.sql:
Not sure why this is a problem - the row is present in the table after the installation has finished, so maybe a commit is missing somewhere? Strange but not a problem.
- In the Installation Guide under "3. Installation: add System Message", I think removing the a-Icon class looks better, so:
- In Apex 20.2, a D3 JavaScript library is missing.
So when you open the Apex-Sert application, you see this error in the browser console:
This results in errors like:
- SERT app: Dashboard and part of left sidebar are empty (charts are missing).
- SERT app: Actions menus in Interative Reports do not work.
- SERT app: Column filters in Interative Reports do not work.
- SERT-ADMIN app: You can not log into the application.
Note that in Apex 22.2 and 24.1 this is not an issue (the library is not used).
Fix:
- Go to https://github.com/d3/d3/releases?q=3.5.5&expanded=true - note that you may need another version for Apex versions other than 20.2.
- Download d3.zip and unzip it.
- Copy all d3 files to this (new) directory on the server - in my case: /usr/share/tomcat/webapps/i/libraries/d3/3.5.5/
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In Apex 24.1 with 23aiFree, I got an error when opening the SERT application (109): "Error processing condition."
Cause: The ordsys schema is missing in 23aiFree, which causes package sv_sert_240100.pl_fpdf to become invalid.
Fix: Disable all procedures/functions in sv_sert_240100.pl_fpdf that reference ordsys (and all that cause compilation errors because of that) until the package compiles OK, and then recompile all invalid objects in that schema.
I could not find anything that (in)directly uses any of those procedures/functions, so that should not cause any problems.
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In Apex 24.1 with 23aiFree, I got an error when clicking Evaluate in the SERT application (Home page): "Error processing computation."
Cause: In sv_sert_240100.sv_sec_util, dbms_crypto.hash is used with hash type 1 (MD4). In 23aiFree this hash type is not available anymore, so sv_sert_240100.sv_sec_util is invalid. One fix is to use hash type 2 (MD5), but that has been deprecated so it's not very future-proof. All other hash functions return a longer value than MD4/MD5 (which are 128 bits), so we would need to truncate those to fit.
The 2 options: Change sv_sert_240100.sv_sec_util line 2792 from
to
OR