Preparing your Oracle Forms Conversion

Before we start our actual Forms Conversion project, we have to take some steps. We have seen in the previous chapter that we need to understand some things about the application. Now it's time to gather the sources of our application and get our hands dirty.

When we are participating in a Forms Conversion project, it means we take the source files of our application, turn them into XML files, and upload them into the Forms Conversion part of APEX. This chapter describes what we do before uploading the XML files and starting our actual Forms Conversion project.

Get your stuff!

When we talk about source files, it would come in very handy if we got all the right versions of these files. In order to do the Conversion project, we need the same components that are used in the production environment. For these components, we have to get the source files of the components we want to convert. This means we have no use of the runtime files (Oracle Forms runtime files have the FMX extension). In other words, for Forms components we don't need the FMX files, but the FMB source files.

These are a few ground rules we have to take into account:

• We need to make sure that there's no more development on the components we are about to use in our Conversion project. This is because we are now going to freeze our sources and new developments won't be taken into the Conversion project at all. So there will be no changes in our project.
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• Put all the source files in a safe place. In other words, copy the latest version of your files into a new directory to which only you, and perhaps your teammates, have access.
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• If the development team of your organization is using Oracle Designer for the development of its applications, it would be a good idea to generate all the modules from scratch. You would like to use the source on which the runtime files were created only if there are post-generation adjustments to be made in the modules.

We need the following files for our Conversion project:

• Forms Modules: With the FMB extension
• Object Libraries: With the OLB extension
• Forms Menus: With the MMB extension
• PL/SQL Libraries: With the PLL extension
• Report Files: With the RDF, REX, or JSP extensions

When we take these source files, we will be able to create all the necessary XML files that we need for the Forms Conversion project.