Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Dude, Where Are My Buttons?

An interesting bug was reported the other day on the Oracle Technology Network discussion forum for Oracle Application Express.  The scenario is as follows:

1)  Download and install Oracle Application Express 4.2.1 anew.
2)  Install a translated version of Oracle Application Express
3)  Login to a workspace and navigate to SQL Workshop.

What should look like:



is actually displayed as:



Unfortunately, the buttons of SQL Workshop are not displayed when you install a translated version of Oracle Application Express 4.2.1.  [If you had Oracle Application Express 4.2 installed and downloaded/installed the Oracle Application Express 4.2.1 patch set from My Oracle Support, you would not encounter this issue.]

This problem can be remedied by downloading the patch set exception for Bug 16191354 from My Oracle Support and applying it to your APEX 4.2.1 instance.

Note - if you choose to install additional translated versions, it's safe to re-run the patch 16191354 after you've installed all translations.

Update:  As of January 29, 2013, the APEX 4.2.1 download was updated to correct this problem.  So if you download the apex_4.2.1.zip file (full distribution) after January 29, 2013, you should not encounter this problem and you can safely ignore this blog post.