Setup Oracle Designer

Recently I got an assignment to design a approval and pricing system in Oracle. So I thought of Oracle Designer I used long time ago. I remember it is somewhat a good tool to design ERD etc for application in Oracle Database, at least it's all by Oracle.

 

However, my experience these days dispointed me much. Partialy, it's because I directly got my hand dirty without going through the release notes or installation guide. Partialy it's because this tool is not that easy to install.

 

Since I have Form and Report 6i installed in my pc, I planned to use Designer 6i. There's a 10g database in my pc too, so I was going to use it as testing database and to store repository. Unfortunately, I never tried to connect 6i things such as form builder to this 10g database.

 

The first issue I encountered is ORACLE_HOME. I didn't remeber it should reside in the same home as Oracle Form and Report 6i. After several trials, I finally installed it, actualy the installtion process was quite straight forward, simply clicking next and ok and no. But next came the puzzle how to use it. This is my second issue. Only by then did I find out 6i couldn't connect to my 10g DB. I tried to change O7_DICTIONARY_ACCESSIBILITY to TRUE, but not effect. And COMPATIBILITY also didn't work. After doing some googling, I finally got a tip about chartset. Mine is AL16UTF16. And 6i is supposed to use UTF8. So I did following:

1. shutdown 10g

2. startup restrict

3. alter database set characterset internal_use UTF8;

4. shutdown immediate

5. startup and select * from V$NLS_PARAMETERS. Now the NLS_CHARACTERSET is UTF8

6. try connecting, good it worked.

 

Thirdly, I have a lot of errors to use Repository Admin Utility to create repository. I knew later I forgot to check the requirements. And later I checked , my oracle user lacks of some privileges. This was after I installed Designer 10g and encountered similar issue.

 

I then tried to use Designer 10g. The installation is a little easier since I don't have DS10g in my pc. I simply installed all optional components in Developer suite 10g, including Form and report 10g , Designer 10g. Then I created an Oracle user ods10g. checked requirement and manually grant the privileges to ods10g. Then I started to run Repository Admin Utility.

 

This designer 10g repository admin utility raised error again.  This time the error is RME-02124 and related to some synonym pointing to invalid object. Suddently I recognized I had installed repository in 6i and using public synoym approach, and although that user is dropped, there must be some public synonym pointing to this dropped use, so I

select * from all_synonyms where table_owner = 'ALEX'; oh, yes, there are more than a thousand of such public synoym. So I select them and dropped them all.  Then according to one metalink thread, the RM$REPOSITORIES need to be created. Once it's created, the RAU can run again. Oh, finally it finished installing repository.

 

To be continue.