Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
PlsqlDefaultPage apex
PlsqlDatabasePassword <<your password here>>
Allow from all
</Location>
There are a few things to note here; first the line:
Alias /i/ "/home/ohs/apex4/images/"
This specifies the file system location where any files referenced by the location
/i/
reside. So, for
example, if the user references a file via the URL such as
http://yourserver/i/logo.jpg
the web server will try to return the file
/home/ohs/apex4/images/logo.jpg
(and obviously the request will
fail if that file is not present in that location—assuming there are no other rewrite rules in effect).
For this alias you should specify the file server directory that you downloaded the APEX installation
files into (so that it points to the location of the images subdirectory). This is covered in the Oracle
Application Express installation guide.
While we're discussing the
/i/
alias, it's worth noting that many people choose to locate their own
custom files (for example JavaScript, CSS, and images) in the same file system directory (or a
subdirectory thereof). The key reason they do this is that it means that there are no other web server
configuration changes required (and therefore the web server does not need to be restarted). However,
this is actually quite a bad idea because it means when you upgrade your version of APEX you might
overwrite the directory with the new files from the Oracle APEX installation and therefore lose your own
custom files.
It is far better (in my opinion, at least) to have specific directories for your own custom files, which
means you can upgrade APEX without affecting your own files. I'll show some examples of how you can
achieve this using the Apache virtual hosts feature to give a very flexible environment that supports
multiple APEX applications yet maintains a degree of separation between them.
The next line in the
DADS.CONF
file worth discussing is the
Location
directive itself:
<Location /pls/apex>
This directive determines how users will access your APEX applications; in this case we are using the
default (and actually I find very few reasons to change this), so users will access your application using a
link like
http://yourserver/pls/apex/f?p=1000:1
to access page 1 in application 1000.
One reason you might wish to change this is if you have a single OHS that needs to point to different
databases (perhaps running different versions of APEX). In this scenario you might have a
DADS.CONF
similar to
<Location /pls/apex>
...
</Location>
<Location /pls/apex32>
...
</Location>
