Oracle Forms Debugging: Using the “DEBUG_MESSAGES=YES” runtime option - Handling "Please Acknowledge" message

Oracle Forms Debugging: Using the “DEBUG_MESSAGES=YES” runtime option - Handling "Please Acknowledge" message

“DEBUG_MESSAGES=YES” is a “quick and dirty” technique for pinpointing code problems. This causes a message to automatically display to let you know each trigger as it executes. Once you encounter the runtime error, you will know the last trigger that fired and should be able to trace through the code from that point. For anyone that was around in the SQL*Forms 3.0 days, this was the default behavior when running a form in debug mode.

To use this option from the Form Builder, check the “debug_messages” option on the runtime tab after choosing Tools -> preferences from the menu. From the command line, simply add the “debug_messages=yes” option. 

If you are using an icon in Windows to start your form, add the option to the shortcut command. It would look something like this for Windows platforms:

c:\orant\bin\ifrun60.exe module=myform userid=scott/tiger debug_messages=yes

On Unix:

f60runm module=myform userid=scott/tiger debug_messages=yes

The major disadvantage of using this technique is that you have to acknowledge every message as each trigger executes, which can be very annoying. You will keep getting "Please acknowledge message" prompt each time whenever a new trigger is encountered. Although it shows the triggers that fire, it does not show program units that execute, and there is no way to display the values of variables. It can also cause the same focus problems and program flow interruption that you see with the “MESSAGE” built-in. However, this method is useful if you have no idea which trigger is causing the problem; once you have narrowed down the scope, other troubleshooting techniques would be more appropriate.

Arabic Email Addresses

Most human language scripts are written from Left to Right (L➡︎R). Arabic is written Right to Left (L⬅︎R). An email address written in the Latin script would be displayed L➡︎R — username@domain-name. An Arabic email address, on the other hand, would normally and without intervention be displayed L⬅︎R as domain-name@username.

Letʼs take a fictitious Arabic email address — خالد@الدوحة.قطر

• خالد is the username Khalid
• الدوحة is the 2nd level domain name Doha
• قطر is the Top Level Domain (TLD) Qatar. This part is not fictitious as قطر is a valid ccTLD.

Your browser should be displaying the email address خالد@الدوحة.قطر in L⬅︎R order which is not an order familiar to most L➡︎R readers and so requires some effort to parse.

When text has mixed L➡︎R and L⬅︎R characters it is referred to as Bidirectional (bidi) text. There is a complex Unicode algorithm specifically to determine  display order of bidi text unicode.org/reports/tr9/ If you read this report you will see something called Directional Isolates.

In the html world there are tags and attributes specific to bidi. One such tag is <bdi> which is bidi isolate. Using such html bidi isolation one can incorporate Arabic email addresses that are natural to read for both L➡︎R and L⬅︎R readers. These addresses can be written such that their overall text direction adheres to the text direction of the context. This context may be the direction of the whole html document or some subpart such as a paragraph.

First we will setup our html with a L➡︎R context for L➡︎R readers. The below paragraph (p) is setup with dir (direction) to ltr (left to right). The email address has 3 components: username, 2nd level domain name and TLD. Each component is direction isolated. This gives an email address whose overall direction is L➡︎R. The text of each component is, as it should be, L⬅︎R. I posit that this is much easier for a L➡︎R reader to comprehend. It is now obvious, for instance, to determine which is the username and which is the TLD.

The html code
<p dir="ltr"><bdi>خالد</bdi>@<bdi>الدوحة</bdi>.<bdi>قطر</bdi></p>
displays the address as

خالد@الدوحة.قطر

 

But how will the address be displayed if the context is changed to rtl (right to left). The code correctly displays the whole address in L⬅︎R order, both overall direction and text direction of each component. Thus we have also catered for L⬅︎R readers without changing relevant address display html code.

The html code
<p dir="rtl"><bdi>خالد</bdi>@<bdi>الدوحة</bdi>.<bdi>قطر</bdi></p>
displays the address as

خالد@الدوحة.قطر

Just in case your browser cannot, as yet, handle bidi isolates here are the 2 contexts in image format.