The first workday in Qatar is over.   We got picked up an 8 am this morning and were driven to the the offices of the client.  It soon dawned on me that this is going to be really tough task to deliver in the 3 weeks timeframe involving anything from backup/recover routines to Oracle Warehouse Builder, Oracle Discoverer and Oracle Portal Applications.  Just today I had a 3 hour meeting with a mixture of RittmanMead consultants and employees of the QSO, downloaded and installed Apex, wrote one application for maintenance of base tables in Apex.  Looked at the mappings and transformations and did some table modifications.  The work hours are a little strange for us, 6 day workweek (Fridays off), work today was from 8 – 15:30 and then 18:00 until 21:30.  Then there was dinner and I was back at the hotel at 23:30.  Long day and tomorrow we get picked up at 7:45.

I had an interesting experience with Apex 3.01 today.  The database is an Oracle 10gR2.  I needed to configure the HTTP server to use Apex and according to the installation guide it was straight forward.  The only difference was that the guide was written for Unix and I was installing using Windows.  So, after the installation I tried opening it which went OK, except that no images would show up and I‘d get an Error on page message in my browser.  So after spending 3 hours trying different things I finally found the solution, which seems rather trivial for 3 frustrating hours.  I had to create a virtual directory called /i/ and point it to the location of my images which was something like d:\..\Apache\mod_plsql\images\

Now cut a long story short the directory has to be enclosed in double quotes and and with a slash /, a la Unix.  This was not mentioned in the docs and for an Apache rookie, it was not at all obvious – at the time.  Anyway, just wanted to share my frustrations on Apex.  More later.