Oracle Forms - Understanding XML

If we take a look inside the XML files we just created, we will notice a few things. I use SQL Developer of Oracle to look inside the XML files we just created. It's a free tool that we will need for several other tasks during our Conversion project and it does the job. But, of course, you can use a different XML editor to examine the XML files.

When we open SQL Developer, we can open the files we created earlier. The forms, menus, reports, and libraries are now all in XML or flat files. To open the files in SQL Developer, just click on file and then click on Open (or use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+O). Select the file you want to open from the dialog box that's shown in the following screenshot:

First, we take a look at the Forms Modules in the _fmb.xml files. As you can see, there's a lot of information there. But if we take a further look, we'll see that it's not new information. I will not discuss all of the information that's in the XML files here. For further information about the contents of these files, I recommend reading the Migration Help section in Oracle Application Express.

The following screenshot lets us see the contents of the orders_fmb.xml file that we created earlier. It shows us the name of the Forms Module (ORDERS), the Alerts, the Blocks, and much more. We can see that it's the same information we saw in the previous chapter in the Forms Builder.

If we take a closer look at one of the blocks in the XML file, for example the Items block, we can look for some of the information that APEX uses in the conversion. We can see the names of the Items used in this block. We can also look at the queries that are used in this data block and triggers.