Upgrade Oracle Forms to Apex
I think that the topic is very relevant now. We have many Oracle Form applications and many companies are thinking about which platform to migrate to.
I must say right away that I think that the Oracle Apex is the best alternative. I will not talk about its benefits; a lot has been written about it. For example, here
I see several problems that need to be solved:
I have already solved the first two points, but the third task is the most difficult. I have been thinking about it for several years and have come to the conclusion that it will not be possible to make a full automate. Even the allowable 80% (you know the ratio 80/20) cannot be reached. The most interesting thing is that, perhaps, it is not necessary to upgrade one to one (One FORM => One PAGE) without any changes.
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Now I can create the APEX page from the Oracle Form, create regions from canvas + block, IG/IR/Form according to updateable/not updateable block and one row/multiline block properties. I save and pass to the APEX page:
Moreover, my tool gives an ability to show all DB objects dependencies in the Form objects. I think that this can already be used for the first steps of the Forms to APEX migration of yours Forms applications.
You can see my APEX application ODAUP demo on my site here
Let's look at this decision as the beginning of the journey. I would like to get your opinion and continue moving in this direction.
shows customers new ways to modernize software.
2 年Hi Yuri, well described pathway from Forms 2 APEX. We see and implement three additional ways to improve the migration. 1.) Due to long running maintenance and development we saw a huge amount of technical debt inside the forms (Dead Code, Redundancies, wrong placement of PL/SQL) This could be refactured even bevor taking care about a migration. 2.) We focus not on a 1 Form/Canvas to 1 APP/Page migration, but instead we focus on the business process, which has to be migrated. We track all forms-objects, belonging to a business process and migrate them to APEX. This allow to get rid of feature overloaded forms modules. 3.) We generate some more fragments for APEX, like shared components for LOVs, Processes for Item and Grid-Validation, and we save as much PL/SQL Code while moving them to database. If you like, I'm open to present our approach to you and share some ideas of potential coworking? Best regards Stephan
Interesting work. Congrats. What did you use to perform reflection on the Form to identify all of its components?
Sr. Oracle PL/SQL Developer | Oracle Forms | Oracle Apex
2 年Well done, Yuri