Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
<Location /pls/apex test>
...
</Location>
This configuration allows you to specify different settings for each of the Location directives, so that
you can, for example. access your current environment using
/pls/apex
, an old APEX3.2 environment
using
/pls/apex32
, and a separate test environment using the database access descriptor (DAD) called
/pls/apex test
.
The next line in the configuration:
PlsqlDatabaseConnectString localhost:1521:dbtest ServiceNameFormat
details how the
mod plsql
handler will connect to the database. In this case, since the OHS is installed on
the same machine as the database, it connects to
localhost
(i.e., the local machine), and connects to
dbtest
on the usual listener port (1521). If you installed the OHS on a different machine than the
database machine you would need to specify the hostname (or IP address) of the database machine here
instead of localhost.
The next line specifies that
mod plsql
will connect using the
AL32UTF8
character set in the NLS
settings. This is part of the Oracle APEX installation requirements and you should always use
AL32UTF8
.
PlsqlNLSLanguage AMERICAN AMERICA.AL32UTF8
While you may find that it works with other settings, I can guarantee that at some point it will come
back to bite you and you may find very strange errors occurring. I once saw an APEX application that
occasionally did not render correctly in the browser, sometimes only half the page would be output,
other times garbled characters would appear. It took a while to figure it out, but eventually we tracked it
down to the wrong setting being used in the DAD configuration. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I
typically check that first, but at the time we were convinced it was an “application issue”.
The next line is the one that tells Apache to use the
mod plsql
handler for any requests under the
/pls/apex
location:
SetHandler pls handler
The next few lines are among the crucial ones:
PlsqlDatabaseUsername APEX PUBLIC USER
PlsqlDefaultPage apex
PlsqlDatabasePassword <<your password here>>
Typically you would never need to alter the
PlsqlDefaultPage
value. The
PlsqlDatabaseUsername
will
be
APEX PUBLIC USER
if you have started using APEX with a fairly recent release; if you've used Oracle
APEX since the old days when it was called
HTMLDB
you may well find in some existing
DADS.CONF
files that
you have a reference to
HTMLDB PUBLIC USER
.
The
PlsqlDatabasePassword
parameter specifies the password that you chose when you installed
APEX (I hope you remember what it was!). This aspect of APEX often confuses people, but internally
what happens is
mod plsql
creates a pool of connections to the database and connects as the user
APEX PUBLIC USER
. Note that this account needs to be unlocked so that the
connection can be established.
•
•
Each web request by an end user gets a pooled connect (if and when one is
available).
