Connecting to OAS 10.1.3.x from JDeveloper without using oc4jadmin

Every now and then I get a request to be able to connect to OAS 10.1.3.x from JDeveloper 10.1.3.x using a custom user rather then the default oc4jadmin. A work mate of mine got this working and also found that only certain roles will allow such a connection remotely when using a custom user.

Steps

A) CONFIGURE ORACLE APPLICATION SERVER 10.1.3.X

1. Go to OAS 10.1.3.x EM

http://:/em

2. Select an OC4J instance that you had created.
3. Select Administration.
4. In the Task Name section, under Security select the 'Go to Task' icon for Security Providers.
5. Press the button [Instance Level Security].
6. Select the tab link Realms.
7. In the section Security Provider Attributes: File-Based Security Provider there is a realm
named jazn.com. Select the number under the Users column.
8. Press the button [Create].
9. Add User screen:-

Name field : enter a user name
Password || Confirm Password fields : enter a valid password
In the Available Roles area, select the role like ascontrol_admin and move across to Selected Area.

Press [OK].

10. Restart OC4J container via ASC pressing the [Restart] button or use following commands:-

- opmnctl stopproc process-type=Tars
- opmnctl startproc process-type=Tars


B) JDEVELOPER >> OAS CONNECTION CUSTOM CREATED OC4J CONTAINER AND CUSTOM CREATED USER

1. In JDeveloper 10.1.3.X select Connections navigator.
2. Right-click Application Server node and select 'New Application Server Connection'.
3. On Welcome screen press [Next].
4. Step 1 of 4: Type screen :-

Connection Name field >> enter a app server connection name
Connection Type list field >> select "Oracle Application Server 10g 10.1.3".

Press [Next].

5. Step 2 of 4: Authentication screen:-

Username field : enter user name that was created in previous section at the OAS level.
Password field : enter same password was created in previous section at the OAS level.
Deploy Password checkbox : select.

Press [Next].

6. Step 3 of 4: Connection screen:-

Host Name field : enter host of OAS.
OPMN Port field : change to opmn remote port number
OC4J instance name field : enter of instance where user was created.

Press [Next].

7. Step 4 of 4: Test screen:-

Press [Test Connection]:

That should work but what we found is only 2 roles actually will work as shown by the test below which shows that only 2 roles actually work here, of course was never expecting the role "users" to work. We created 6 users each will the role shown next to them and found only ascontrol_admin and oc4j-administrators would allow such a remote connection

User1 (Role = ascontrol_admin) - SUCCESS
User2 (Role = ascontrol_appadmin) - FAILS
User3 (Role = ascontrol_monitor) - FAILS
User4 (Role = oc4j-administrators) - SUCCESS
User5 (Role = oc4j-app-administrators) - FAILS
User6 (Role = users) - FAILS

Debug PLSQL code from JDeveloper 10.1.3.x causing timed out error

You may find that when trying to debug PLSQL from JDeveloper an error as follows appears:

Connecting to the database MyHRConn.
Executing PL/SQL: ALTER SESSION SET PLSQL_DEBUG=TRUE
Executing PL/SQL: CALL DBMS_DEBUG_JDWP.CONNECT_TCP( '172.16.26.237', '4717' )
ORA-30683: failure establishing connection to debugger
ORA-12535: TNS:operation timed out
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_DEBUG_JDWP", line 68
ORA-06512: at line 1
Process exited.
Disconnecting from the database MyHRConn.

It's very likely from the error you have a firewall between the client (JDeveloper) and the database server in which case you can simply open up the port at the firewall level, but while it's dynamically assigned this won't work, so follow these steps to ensure you use a static port and then you can configure the firewall to enable the connection

1. If necessary, close JDeveloper.
2. In a text editor, open {jdev_install}/jdev/system/oracle.jdeveloper./ide.properties
3. Type the following:

DatabaseDebuggerPortOverride={port_number}

where is the {port_number} is the port number you want the debugger to use.

4. Save ide.properties.

When you restart JDeveloper, the port you specified will be used and hopefully you can connect without any issue.

Debug PLSQL code from JDeveloper 10.1.3.x causing timed out error.

You may find that when trying to debug PLSQL from JDeveloper an error as follows appears:

Connecting to the database MyHRConn.
Executing PL/SQL: ALTER SESSION SET PLSQL_DEBUG=TRUE
Executing PL/SQL: CALL DBMS_DEBUG_JDWP.CONNECT_TCP( '172.16.26.237', '4717' )
ORA-30683: failure establishing connection to debugger
ORA-12535: TNS:operation timed out
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_DEBUG_JDWP", line 68
ORA-06512: at line 1
Process exited.
Disconnecting from the database MyHRConn.

It's very likely from the error you have a firewall between the client (JDeveloper) and the database server in which case you can simply open up the port at the firewall level, but while it's dynamically assigned this won't work, so follow these steps to ensure you use a static port and then you can configure the firewall to enable the connection

1. If necessary, close JDeveloper. 2. In a text editor, open /ide.properties . 3. Type the following: DatabaseDebuggerPortOverride= where is the port number you want the debugger to use. 4. Save ide.properties.

When you restart JDeveloper, the port you specified will be used and hopefully you can connect without any issue.

Application Server Connection 10.1.3.x from Jdeveloper 10.1.3.x

Creating an application server connection from JDeveloper 10.1.3.x requires you to know a bit about the application server here is all you need to find out exactly what to put in the fields. If you don't know it's worth running some of these commands to avoid having to determine why the connection is failing to establish when testing it.

OPMN Remote Port

Issue the following command on the OAS server to get the OPMN port number:

> opmnctl status -port

Output:

papicell-au2.au.oracle.com:6007

Hostname

Ensure you can ping the host by name or IP address from your machine where Jdeveloper is running. You could even try connecting using telnet should the host allow it, but normally ping is enough to verify you have a reachable host.

> telnet papicell-au2.au.oracle.com 6007

That command will tell you whether or not you can reach the host through the OPMN port remotely.

OC4J Instance Name

To determine this name you simply use a command as follows on the OAS server, which has a column known as process-type which identifies the OC4J instances you can connect to.

> opmnctl status

Connect to

Here we decide if we are connecting to a group or a single instance. A group is a collection of OC4J instances which allows you to deploy applications to a group which in turns deploys your application to every container within the group. Basically when you select the check box "group" you then need to provide a group name.

The easiest way to determine the group name is to log into ASC (Application server console) which shows you exactly what type of topology setup you have for your OAS.

Also you can use the command we used previously to get the group name as follows

> opmnctl status

This time your looking at the column ias-component which will give you the group name you want to use which identified by OC4JGroup:{name} all you need is {name} portion to use as the group name

Eg: OC4JGroup:pas_group

Hope this helps those remote connection problems you may have from JDeveloper 10.1.3.x to OAS 10.1.3.x.

Accessing a JMS queue from stand alone client in OAS 10.1.2

I am normally accessing JMS queues from OAS 10.1.3 but today I had to do it in 10.1.2 and found that unless I created a new user I was unable to get access to the queue once authenticated, his exactly what I did.

1. Log into ias console and click on your oc4j container, I used home
2. Click on administration link
3. Click on security link
4. Click add user button and created a user as follows

user: test
password: test123

Note: Check all check boxes to add all group names to ensure no permission issues will exist using this user

5. Edit $ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/home/config/jms.xml and ensure the following two entries exist

<queue name="Demo Queue" location="jms/demoQueue">
A dummy queue
</queue>

<queue-connection-factory
name="jms/QueueConnectionFactory"
location="jms/QueueConnectionFactory"/>

6. Now the code will be as follows, I am using an ormi:// connection where I obtained the container RMI port using "opmnctl status -l"

package mypackage1;
import java.util.Hashtable;
import javax.jms.Queue;
import javax.jms.QueueConnectionFactory;
import javax.naming.Context;
import javax.naming.InitialContext;

public class TestJMSConnection
{

  /**
   *
   * @param args
   */
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
  {
    TestJMSConnection testJMSConnection = new TestJMSConnection();
    Hashtable env = new Hashtable();
    env.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY, "com.evermind.server.rmi.RMIInitialContextFactory");
    env.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL,"ormi://10.187.80.135:12401");
    env.put(Context.SECURITY_PRINCIPAL,"test");
    env.put(Context.SECURITY_CREDENTIALS,"test123");
    InitialContext ctx = new InitialContext(env);
   
    System.out.println("Initial Context Set");

    QueueConnectionFactory qcf = (QueueConnectionFactory)
       ctx.lookup("jms/QueueConnectionFactory");
   
    System.out.println("Found factory jms/QueueConnectionFactory");
   
    Queue q = (Queue) ctx.lookup("jms/demoQueue");
       
    System.out.println("Found queue jms/demoQueue");
   
    System.out.println("all done..");
  }
}

7. In JDeveloper 10.1.2 you need to add these two libraries so the code compiles

• Oracle 9ias
• J2EE

8. When run the output is as follows:

Initial Context Set
Found factory jms/QueueConnectionFactory
Found queue jms/demoQueue
all done..

Using Oracle Ant Tasks within JDeveloper 10g

With OAS 10.1.3.x they released a set of Ant tasks that enable operations such as application deployment, resource configuration and server lifecycle tasks to be performed. I normally run these from the command line but recently needed to set this up in JDeveloper 10.1.3.2, his how I did that.

1. Firstly I decided to use this 10.1.3.x how to on the OTN web site

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/java/oc4j/1013/how_to/index.html
How-To Swap XML Parsers ( zip ) Aug-2006

I downloaded the ZIP file onto my file system so I could set this up in Jdeveloper. The 3 files I need are as follows.

• ant-oracle.properties
• ant-oracle.xml
• build.xml

2. In JDeveloper create a new empty project within a workspace
3. From the Object gallery add a new empty build.xml file
4. Copy the 3 files above into the same directory the build.xml was added to in JDeveloper. Basically you are replacing the empty build.xml and adding the 2 other files needed for oracle ant tasks.
5. Use the Refresh icon on the application navigator to ensure all 3 files appear in the project as shown below.




6. Now we need to configure the ant-oracle.properties file to specify our deployment server settings. I am deploying to a OAS 10.1.3.2 instance named pas_oc4j. That said his the settings I am using , thats pretty much all you need to set in that file.

oracleas.host=papicell-linux.au.oracle.com
oracleas.http.port=7779
oracleas.admin.port=6007
oracleas.admin.user=oc4jadmin
oracleas.admin.password=welcome1
oracleas.binding.module=default-web-site
oracleas.deployer.uri=deployer:oc4j:opmn://${oracleas.host}:${oracleas.admin.port}/${oracleas.oc4j.instance}
oracleas.oc4j.instance=pas_oc4j

7. Now we have an empty project , but in order to use this otn how to we need to add a JSP to the project, a library and a few deployment descriptor XML files.
8. Add the library "Oracle XML Parser v2" to the project using the Project Properties dialog
9. Add a new JSP file called "index.jsp" using the new object gallery, I placed it in a folder named "web".

What you will find is a web.xml is created automatically for you once the JSP was created in the public_html\WEB-INF directory. All we need to do now is copy the files below from the downloaded how to ZIP into that directory on the file system and press Refresh to show the files in the JDeveloper project

• orion-application.xml
• application.xml

10. Now we are ready to deploy using ant BUT before we do that we need to alter the build.xml as the file downloaded from OTN is setup based on the ZIP file, but in JDeveloper we have a slightly different directory structure so in the build.xml we need to alter the "init" target so it looks as follows which matches our directory structure in the project


<target name="init" depends="common">

<echo message="-----> Initializing project properties"/>

<property name="app.name" value="how-to-swapxmlparser"/>

<property name="ear.name" value="${app.name}"/>

<property name="web.name" value="${ear.name}-web"/>

<property name="src.dir" value="./public_html"/>

<property name="bld.dir" value="./build"/>

<property name="lib.dir" value="D:\jdev\jdevprod\10132\jdev\mywork\OracleAntDemo\OC4JAntDelpoy/lib"/>

<property name="etc.dir" value="./public_html/WEB-INF"/>

<property name="log.dir" value="./log"/>

<property name="src.web.dir" value="${src.dir}/web"/>

<property name="bld.web.dir" value="${bld.dir}/${web.name}"/>

<property name="bld.ear.dir" value="${bld.dir}/${ear.name}"/>

<property name="bld.compiler" value="classic"/>

<property name="class.files" value="**/*.class"/>

<property name="bak.files" value="**/*~"/>

</target>


11. You will see I hard coded the full path to the final EAR file we will deploy due to an issue with JDeveloper which once I sort it out I will update this blog with a more elegant way of referring to that file. For now simple replace the full path with your directory structure ensuring "lib" remains as ant script is using the "lib" directory.

D:\jdev\jdevprod\10132\jdev\mywork\OracleAntDemo\OC4JAntDelpoy/lib

12. Right click on build.xml and select -> Run Ant and select the target all

Output as follows

Buildfile: D:\jdev\jdevprod\10132\jdev\mywork\OracleAntDemo\OC4JAntDelpoy\build.xml

common:
[echo] BuildName: how-to-swapxmlparser
[echo] BuildHome: D:\jdev\jdevprod\10132\jdev\mywork\OracleAntDemo\OC4JAntDelpoy
[echo] BuildFile: D:\jdev\jdevprod\10132\jdev\mywork\OracleAntDemo\OC4JAntDelpoy\build.xml
[echo] BuildJVM: 1.5

init:
[echo] -----> Initializing project properties

setup:
[echo] -----> Creating the required sub-directories

package-web:

package-app:

checkoc4javailable:
[echo] ------> Checking to see if OC4J is available to deploy to
[echo] Pinging papicell-au2.au.oracle.com:6007
[echo] If OC4J is not started, please start it now.

skipdeploy:

deploy-ear:
[echo] -----> Deploying the application module deployment (ear) file
[echo] Target: deployer:oc4j:opmn://papicell-au2.au.oracle.com:6007/pas_oc4j
[echo] lib.dir: D:\jdev\jdevprod\10132\jdev\mywork\OracleAntDemo\OC4JAntDelpoy/lib/how-to-swapxmlparser.ear
[oracle:deploy] Deploying application how-to-swapxmlparser.
[oracle:deploy] Application deployer for how-to-swapxmlparser COMPLETES.

deploy:
[echo] -----> Deployed the application components required by OC4J for the execution of this application

all:
[echo] -----> Created all deployable units for the application

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 4 seconds


So after a little tweaking we can easily get the OC4J OTN 10.1.3.x how-to's incorporated into JDeveloper using Oracle Ant Tasks to do our compilation/deployment for us.