A Basic Tutorial on Oracle9i Forms and Reports

Covering Developer version 9i for Windows NT/2000/XP By Richard Holowczak

This tutorial introduces the Oracle9i Developer Suite Release 2 (August, 2002) that includes Oracle Forms 9.0 and Oracle Reports 9.0. The main objectives are to demonstrate and provide hands-on instructions on creating and modifying data entry and query forms in various configurations, reports and graphics.

Caveats: Please note that Oracle tends to change things like menu items, prompts and other small things between each major (certainly) and often minor release. Depending on the exact release of Oracle9i Developer Suite you have, you may find some small discrepencies between what is shown in this tutorial and what you see on your screen.

Prerequisites
Before following this tutorial, a student must have a valid user account in an Oracle server or a local installation of an Oracle database. Contact your DBA or systems administrator to learn the details of how Oracle server is set up in your organization.

If you have a local instance of the Oracle database, please do not use the SYSTEM (DBA) account to practice development. There is a good chance you can corrupt the entire database by mistake. You are much better off making use of the SCOTT/TIGER schema or (even better) creating a separate user (schema) for this tutorial work and for practicing.

One more word of caution. Oracle has designed Oracle9i as a three tier architecture. This means that the database (Oracle9i server) should run on one server, the application Server (oracle9i Application Server or Oracle9iAS Containers for Java (OC4J) server as used here) runs on a second server and the client application (written in Oracle Forms and Reports for example) runs on a third machine.

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About the Author: Richard Holowczak is an Associate Professor of Computer Information Systems at the Zicklin School of Business in Baruch College, City University of New York.