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Apex 20.2 Upgrade experience...

Submitted by dave on Mon, 11/02/2020 - 17:11

There are some impressive new features in 20.2. unfortunately my latest upgrades are not going so well.

I see we've got a bundle patch already! Patch 32006852: PSE BUNDLE FOR APEX 20.2 (PSES ON TOP OF 20.2.0.00.20)... But I don't see any of the issues I encountered being addressed.

From most to least severe:

1) ORDS 19.1 munged 3 times over 3 installs

After running the Apex 20.2 upgrade and verifying apps were working OK I ended up getting 404s on ORDS Rest API Calls. I traced back to invalid objects in ORDS_METADATA... but there is still something else going on.

I found a few invalid views in ORDS_METADATA after the upgrade. Seems there were at least some permissions issues, maybe more. Running the following allowed all objects in ORDS_METADATA to be compiled, but still had issues trying to access Rest API calls as before the ugprade.
grant select on apex_listener.wwv_flow_rt$modules to ORDS_METADATA;

As I didn't have a lot of time to waste I updated the SR, backed up my modules, uninstalled and reinstalled ORDS into the database,

Update: We did do an ORDS validate during our SR troubleshooting and it came out clean, full restart of environment and was still getting 404s. After 3 shots at it I had to upgrade Prod so went with tried and true uninstall/reinstall of ORDS.

Conclusion: Not going to dwell on this one. I'll just be doubly sure that I keep good exports/backups of my Rest API Module definitions.

2) Computations using SQL Expressions are not working.

*** Still verifying this one ***

Computations created as SQL Expression are having a ";" added to the end of them. When Apex decodes the field to do a computation it creates an invalid statement.

SQL Expression Computation example : trim(P01_NAME);

Gets translated into this and errors out:

ORA-06512: at "APEX_200200.WWV_FLOW_COMPUTATION", line 236
error_statement:
select lower(trim(:P22_FQDN));
from sys.dual

No errors on these screens as of last week, since they won't submit I would have gotten a call real quick... and I did this morning after the 20.2 upgrade and users trying to get work done.

Conclusion: Apex developers were being nice to my developers and stripping semicolons from the end of these types of expressions in 19.1. I'm cool with them ripping the band-aid off and not allowing, doesn't make sense in the context so I'm good with no allowing it.

3) Pretty URL for instance login is gone.

The typical Pretty URL for the general logins screen (where you specify Workspace/Username/Password) is giving 403 forbidden error. It is interesting that I'm getting a 403 instead of a 404 - so the URL is there as an anonymous user i'm just getting a hand-in-face authoritzation error. I'm trying to log into the IDE so yup, i'm not identified to the server yet.

We used to be able to use this:
https://apex.server.com/apex/apexdev/apex_login

And now we must use this:
https://apex.server.com/apex/apexdev/f?p=4550

Opened an SR and was pointed to the new Pretty URL settings... but these seem to be per application, not for the environment as a whole. Still pushing on the SR so will update with findings here.

Conclusion: Joel Kallman mentioned that I should try https://apex.server.com/apex/apexdev/apex . It worked and looks like apex_login has been deprecated.