This chapter describes the features and improvements in 11g Release 2 of Oracle Fusion Middleware Forms Services.
For the list of new features in Oracle Forms Services 11g Release 1, see "What's New in Oracle Forms Services" in Oracle Fusion Middleware Forms Services Deployment Guide.
Oracle Access Manager 11g is a Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE)-based enterprise-level security application that provides restricted access to confidential information and centralized authentication and authorization services. Oracle Forms 11g Release 2 supports Oracle Access Manager (OAM) as the authentication server in Single Sign-On mode with mod_osso and webgate as the access clients.
For more information, see Chapter 9, "Using Forms Services with Oracle Single Sign-On".
The previous release of Oracle Forms allowed you to manage the startup of a configurable number of Forms Runtime engines prior to their usage. With Oracle Forms 11g Release 2, you can now schedule the prestart of Forms Runtime processes on a more flexible basis, at any appropriate time. You can schedule a Forms Runtime prestart, view existing schedules, delete any existing schedule, and export and import a schedule using the Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control.
For more information, see Section 14.1.2.3, "Scheduling Runtime Pooling".
Forms Diagnostics Agent allows the user to collect Forms metrics in a repository. This feature enables the user to provide forms metrics information (that is available with DMS) into the database tables so that the users can access these metrics as historical data. The agent application provides an interface that enables the user to record the frequency of data collection as input and manage the starting or stopping of data collection.
For more information, see Chapter 15, "Forms Diagnostics Agent".
Use the Network Statistics feature that is now available with Oracle Forms 11g Release 2 to help diagnose performance related issues. The networkStats parameter enables the display of the aggregate statistics in the status bar. This feature provides the number of round trips between the Forms client and server, as well as the total number of bytes exchanged between client and server. The Network Statistics feature is enabled by specifying the networkStats parameter in the base HTML files.
For more information, see Section 4.2.5.7, "Advanced Configuration Parameters".
A Unicode Column is a database column whose datatype is NCHAR or NVARCHAR2. Oracle Forms 11g Release 2 introduces a new datatype of NCHAR. Forms datatype NCHAR corresponds to the SQL datatypes NCHAR and NVARCHAR2.
For more information, see Data Type Property and WHERE Clause Property in Forms Builder Online Help.
Oracle Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) is a feature of Oracle Fusion Middleware that provides non-intrusive monitoring. It gives an insight into how a user interacts with an application. Oracle Forms 11g Release 2 has added new features to allow fine-grained recording of information in RUEI. This includes adding new arguments to the MESSAGE built-in, allowing application developers to effectively define their own logical units of work that they want timing information about.
The previous versions of Oracle Forms allowed the users to specify a file name as image source for Image Items and Iconic Buttons. With Oracle Forms 11g Release 2, the user can also specify a URL as image source for Image items and Iconic Buttons.
For more information, see READ_IMAGE_FILE Built-in and Icon Name Property in Forms Builder Online Help.
The guiMode parameter is designed to control the runtime GUI of a Form application. This applet configuration parameter gives the user the option to disable/enable the visibility of the default menubar and title bar in the Forms application to allow for more seamless integration of the Forms applet into other HTML pages.
For more information, see Section 3.4.3, "guiMode Configuration Parameter".