Re: OWA can't use 8-bit charset to connect to Oracle

Owen Crowley (owen_at_hodes.com) wrote:
: This one has me stumped.
:
: I have a 7.3.2 database created with the WE8ISO8859P1 character set.
:
: If I use the Oracle WebServer v1 to invoke owa, I am able to use the
: WE8ISO8859P1 charset to connect to Oracle from owa -- which is good
: because I need to operate in 8-bit characters.
:
: If I use the NCSA demon on the same port to connect to the database using
: the same owa executable and the same owa.cfg file, the connection attempt
: fails and owa generates the following error:
:
: OWS-05100: Agent : unable to connect due to Oracle error 12705
: ORA-12705: invalid or unknown NLS parameter value specified
:
: This makes no sense, of course, because all I've done is switch webservers.
:
: If I change owa.cfg to connect to the database using US7ASCII, the NCSA
: demon has no problem.
:
: The trouble is, we have strong reasons to use the NCSA demon, but we also
: need to operate in iso-8859-1 (i.e., WE8ISO8859P1).
:
: Does anyone know what I need to do to make this work? I've tried setting
: ORACLE_HOME and ORA_NLS before starting httpd, but that does no good. (The
: NCSA demon is httpd 1.5.0a)
:
: Thanks.

You need to have the environment variables ORACLE_HOME, ORACLE_SID or TWO_TASK, ORA_NLS and NLS_LANG visible to the CGI process executing owa not the http server itself.
There is two solutions to your problem:
1. create a wrapper around owa, that's properly initializes the environment.
2. modify the httpd source so it will pass the required environment variables on to the cgi process in addition to the ones it passes on anyway.

dave

-- 
David-Michael Lincke
Research Assistant
Institute for Information Management IWI-HSG, University of St. Gallen
EMail:	David-Michael.Lincke_at_iwi.unisg.ch, dlincke_at_sgcl1.unisg.ch
URL:	http://www-iwi.unisg.ch/about/team/dal.html