Installing Apex 3.0.1 on Oracle XE

Yesterday i installed Oracle Application Express 3.0.1 on top of Oracle XE.
I followed the instructions given in the How to Upgrade section of this page.

If you are getting the following error message when you run the post-installation script called apxldimg.sql:

ERROR at line 1:
ORA-22288: file or LOB operation FILEOPEN failed
the system cannot find the path specified.
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_LOB", line 523
ORA-06512: at  "SYS.XMLTYPE", line 287
ORA-06512: at line 15

It means that you, like me, *interpreted* the instructions, instead of merely *executing* them... ;-)

Here is the fatal snippet from the document:

Once you complete the standard install, you need to perform the following steps to complete the upgrade:

1. Connect to SQL*Plus as SYS
2. @APEX_HOME/apex/apxldimg.sql APEX_HOME
3. @APEX_HOME/apex/apxxepwd.sql password
   (where password is the password of the Application Express internal ADMIN account)

For the steps above, APEX_HOME is the directory where the Application Express software was unzipped.

I unzipped the files into a directory (or folder if you prefer...) called C:\temp with the Use Folders names option checked.
This means i ended up with an apex subdirectory below C:\temp.
Then i made this apex directory current, as per the instructions given in the main Installation Guide and then i executed the main installation script.

No problems reported.

Then, from SQL*Plus, i ran the following statement:

@apxldimg.sql C:\temp\apex

Mistake!

If you read carefully the instructions, you should notice that by APEX_HOME, the author of the document means the equivalent of the C:\temp directory, not its apex subdirectory!

So, if you go up one level from this apex directory, then you should be able to re-run those two scripts without further problems.

@apex\apxldimg.sql C:\temp

or from any directory i presume:

@C:\temp\apex\apxldimg.sql C:\temp  (most similar to the original instructions)

As you see the trick is in the apparent directory change between the main installation script and the post installation scripts. However there is no need to change directory at all if you replace APEX_HOME with the full path of the directory where the files were unzipped (C:\temp).

And, by the way, it's so cool to have the real thing working on XE!

See more articles about Oracle Application Express or download tools and utilities.