Chapter 6: Other Services

---

There are several other services that come along with Oracle E-Business Suite that have not been touched on yet. All of these work together to provide the overall integrated picture of the suite. Each component by itself is a powerful tool that could, in other circumstances, be used on its own to provide nearly total solutions to many company problems, but together they answer nearly any question that thousands of companies worldwide have every day.

Forms

The Apps Forms Server is the service that provides the infrastructure that enables forms to run and to be served up to the end user via the Web interface. It is the event driven interface from the front-end form to the database that produces the interface result that the end users see when they are presented with somewhere that data input is required. It assists in field level validations, the presentation of Lists of Values, and the multiple documents interface that allows you the ease of navigating between several open windows without actually having to close any of them (the simple click adjusts the focus from one to the other while allowing all other open windows to remain running in the background). The Forms Server typically installs on one of the middle tier servers and has as its primary job, the presentation of forms via the Apps Interface.

Built with Oracle Forms, Release 6i, the forms in Applications 11i are simple to understand and follow a well established set of Oracle E-Business Suite programming standards.

The Forms Server, as the underlying engine that sends Applications Forms to the Web, is one of the main underlying pieces of the application; it is the primary location where the business logic, business rules, and data management logic reside. Forms has been a core component of Oracle Financials from the very beginning and the Forms Server now provides the ability to no longer require client server architecture, but to have the same forms served up through the thin client browser-based architecture.

In the old client server model, the runtime component is responsible for painting the GUI form to the screen, for containing all application code (e.g., the FMX file, the PLL libraries) as well as the entire runtime component for accessing the database. In the Forms Server model, the form still contains all application code, but now the application code continues to sit on the middle tier server rather than having to be installed on each individual client machine. The Forms Server and the browser work together to provide the GUI interface to the client. While this is a somewhat cosmetic change in how things basically work, it also means that there is a lesser load on the client, but a higher impact on the network as now the image of the screen has to be transmitted on the browser.

Because there is the potential for several users to access the same form at exactly the same time, the Forms Server has to provide the ability to cache the common information in a common memory area and allow for the only difference to be the data that is accessed through the interface.

Administering the Forms Server

You are provided with a simple set of scripts that should be used to start up and shut down the Oracle For ms Server. Located in the %COMMON_TOP% directory under admin\scripts (admin\scripts\ <SID> once you move to AutoConfig), these commands can be called in batch or individually at the command line to startup and shut down the services.

 forms60_server start <optional>parameters 

To ensure direction of any errors to a specific log file:

 forms60_server start log=\usr\logs\forms_server.log 

To shut down the server:

 forms60_server stop 

To test your Forms Server from the Web:

 http://yourhost.your. company.com:8010t/dev60html/runform.htm 

The Forms Server comprises a set of executables that are responsible for different aspects of the different forms that are encountered in your application interface. These executables are located within the $ORACLE_HOME\bin directory of your middle tier machine where the Forms Server is running. Table 6.1 gives a brief explanation of the components and the executables responsible.

Table 6.1: Oracle Forms Executables

Component	Executable Name
Oracle Forms CGI	f60cgi
Oracle Forms Listener	f60webm
Oracle Forms Server	f60srvm
Oracle Forms Web Cartridge	f60webc.so

---