Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
The bottom region of the page allows you to list all objects that will be created by the supporting object-installation
scripts. At installation time, if any of the listed objects already exist, the install won't proceed, because there could
be a clash. The user installing the application is given the details of which objects are found to already exist.
This section may seem a bit limiting in its scope, but the Validation section, discussed later, allows for more
free-form prerequisite checks.
Substitutions
This section provides the ability to allow the installing user to define the value for application-level substitution
strings at install time. Although substitution strings are meant to be used like static variables, you may not always
know what the value of these strings should be prior to installation. From this interface you can choose which
substitution variables you want to let the installing user define, and what the prompt for each variable should be.
Substitution variables aren't used very often, so this feature is also unlikely to be used. However, it's good to
know that it's there if you need it.
Build Options
We spoke about build options and the fact that they can be used to exclude or hide assigned functionality.
This section allows you to select whether build options you've defined are available to the installing user. By selecting
a build option, the user will be prompted whether they wish to include or exclude the functionality associated with
the build option.
Most of the time, when moving applications to production, you want to exclude all build options.
Validations
This section lets you define any number of pre-installation validations to be run. These validations are similar to
normal page validation and allow full control over whether the application installation can proceed. You may have as
many validations as you wish, and the validations may be conditional as well.
If any validation fails, the installation is halted, and the user is presented with the error message(s) defined in the
failing validation(s).
Install
This is the core of supporting objects and where you define what scripts to run and in what order to install all the
objects your applications need to work properly. Here you can create and manage scripts that install database objects,
workspace or application images, CSS files, static files, and so on. Depending on the type of scripts you're including,
you may be able to create them in different ways.
When it comes to scripts that create the underlying database objects, you've probably used a tool such as SQL
Developer or the SQL Workshop's Generate DDL tool to generate a script to a file.
You can choose to either upload a pre-created script or create the script from scratch. You do so via the Create
Script Wizard shown in Figure
10-15
.
