ORACLE WEBSYSTEM Installation PROBLEM
Date: 1996/02/19
Message-ID: <4gacgj$dv6_at_bastion.erls02.siemens.de>#1/1
From: tkyte_at_us.oracle.com (Thomas J Kyte)
Newsgroups: comp.databases.oracle
Subject: Re: ORACLE WEBSYSTEM Installation PROBLEM
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 1996 19:41:55 GMT
Organization: Oracle Corporation. Redwood Shores, CA
Message-ID: <4g7viq$b1q_at_inet-nntp-gw-1.us.oracle.com>
References: <4fnrld$t29_at_server-b.cs.interbusiness.it> <owen-1502962256500001_at_199.35.160.30>
owen_at_hodes.com (Owen Crowley) wrote:
[snip]
>Once you get it installed, evaluate it carefully. I have the production
>version and all three components -- the web demon, the middleware, and the
>PL/SQL code -- are buggy. We ended up using the NCSA demon in place of the
>web demon. The PL/SQL bugs are generally fixable (they probably won't
>affect you anyway), but we've come across a middleware bug that is really
>giving us grief.
I emailed a couple of times with Owen to determine what the problems he was having were. What we discovered was:
- There were no identified pl/sql bugs.
- the web daemon bug is not a bug with the Oracle Web Server but rather a bug with the Netscape browser v2.0. It is evident in the Netscape 2.0 betas and is fixed in the 2.0 beta 6 for Unix, and the 2.0 production for Windows/95. It is still evident on the 2.0 versions on Mac and Windows 3.x. What happens is when Netscape "POSTS" information, they add extra junk on the end of it. The Web server gets the beginning of this and behaves correctly, when it sees the extra stuff at the end, it pumps out an invalid request message that appears at the bottom of you page. It causes no loss of data, no incorrect answers, just puts an annoying message on the bottom of the screen. My work around has been to put:
if ( owa_util.get_cgi_env( 'HTTP_USER_AGENT' ) like '%Mozilla%' ) then
for i in 1 .. 10 loop
htp.p( '<br>' );
end loop;
htp.p( '<font size=0><!--' );
end if;
At the bottom of my pl/sql routines (actually, I put it in a common routine all of my plsql routines call to pump out my standard footer on all pages). This pushes the error message down a lot with the <br>'s, and then shrinks the font real small, and then opens up a comment. Actually, We should be able to just put '<!--' out to start a comment but Netscape has another bug that became evident when doing this. If Netscape sees a <body> tag in a comment, it immediately forgets it is in a comment.
If you use the above routine, you get the error message to simply read "invalid request", have it printed in a really small font, and it will be off the bottom of the page.
Netscape is the only browser that exhibits the behaviour. PowerBrowser, Mosaic, and Enhanced Mosaic do not suffer from this problem.
- The OWA bug is definitely a bug, has a bug number and all. It is fixed in WebServer 2.0 alpha.
>Specifically, owa (the middleware) seems to have a problem feeding out
>strings of text over 1K that don't contain newlines. This in effect means
>that owa cannot feed out a medium size paragraph in one operation. To an
>extent we can code around this, but there are certain circumstances in
>which side effects are unavoidable.
Thomas Kyte
tkyte_at_us.oracle.com
Oracle Government
opinions and statements are mine and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Oracle Corporation. Received on Mon Feb 19 1996 - 00:00:00 CET