The application configuration file

Each web service and Oracle InForm Adapter Windows service has an application configuration file. This file contains product-specific Oracle application configuration settings.

The application configuration files are in the \bin\config directories for the interfaces. They are named as follows:

Service type	File name / Example
Web service	InFormAdapter.<interfacename>.config Example: InFormAdapter.coding.config Location: <installation_directory>\coding\bin\config
Windows service	<servicename>Service.config InFormServerAdapterService.config

In the application configuration files, you can configure any of the following settings:

Error logging settings

The Oracle InForm Adapter software uses the open source log4net component (http://logging.apache.org/log4net/) to perform error logging to a configurable location.

• By default, all Oracle InForm Adapter web services and Windows services are configured to log all errors that occur to the event viewer.

  However, they can be configured to log additional information to a log file or some other location.

• Some requests that return errors deliver the errors to the calling application or client process.

  In some situations (for example, when the debugging level of error logging is enabled), only the errors related to the request are relayed to the calling application. Debugging errors can be routed to another location.

For more information, see http://logging.apache.org/log4net/release/config-examples.html.

Setting the ChunkSize parameter in the InFormAdapter.Coding.config file

The ChunkSize parameter is the number of transactions that the Oracle InForm Adapter software looks at in a single coding get request call, and determines whether the PFEX_VERBATIMCACHE table needs to be updated based on new data, deleted data, or changed data in the Oracle InForm software. The ChunkSize parameter is set to 2000 by default.

In very large studies in which the PFEX_VERBATIMCACHE table is rebuilt (for example, when a new mapping is implemented) you might need to increase the value of the ChunkSize parameter. Increasing the value can improve performance of the PFEX_VERBATIMCACHE table rebuild if the verbatim density across the transactions in the study is not too high.

For example, in a very large study, transactions that contain verbatim information could be spread out over several thousand transactions. If the ChunkSize is set to 2000, each call made to the Adapter might update/insert only a few records. If the ChunkSize is set to 20000, each call will bring back many more verbatims. The disadvantage to this higher setting would occur in studies that have a high density of verbatims (such as if all 20000 transactions are from verbatim data). The call to the adapter could take a long time and potentially time out.

The value of the ChunkSize parameter is global to the Oracle InForm Adapter server and will affect all studies registered on that server.

To set the ChunkSize parameter edit the InFormAdapter.Coding.config file entry (this shows the default):

<ChunkSize size="2000" />

For example, in a very large study (greater than one million transactions) change the size to 20000:

<ChunkSize size="20000" />

Enabling or disabling ODM data reduction

ODM data reduction reduces redundancies in ODM output. Items are identified as unique based on their identifying key (OID, repeat key, etc). Contents of items that have the same key are reduced to a single item, in chronological order. The output remains ODM compliant, but is more compact.

ODM data reduction is enabled by default.

You can disable ODM data reduction for the output of the GetTransactions method by including the parameter skipODMReduction=TRUE in input request to the method.

You can disable reduction for all studies on the server by uncommenting the element <SkipODMReduction /> in the InFormAdapter.ODM.config file. The request parameter value, if specified in the method call, takes precedence over the server-wide element value in the configuration file.

For example, if you uncomment <SkipODMReduction /> in the configuration file, and include skipODMReduction=False in the call to the GetTransactions method for study pfst45odm, only the GetTransactions response for that particular request to trial pfst45odm will apply ODM data reduction to the response.

For more information, see the Interfaces Guide.