Understanding Oracle Forms timeout parameters (or should I say FORMS_TIMEOUT) FRM-92102 – A network error has occurred

Today I was at a client who was having trouble as their forms were disconnecting randomly after 15 minutes. They tried to play around with the TIMEOUT settings but they got bogged down in too many documents that pointed to more documents. Therefore, I decided to post a quick guide to Oracle Forms timeout parameters. 

The purpose is to help the community configure Forms sessions to time out after a specified period of user inactivity. Here I discuss the specific timeout parameters of Oracle Forms. For general webserver timeout parameters you should look at note  294749.1  on Oracle Support – Troubleshooting WebForms Tuning / Performance /Time out Problems

Oracle Forms 10g relies on 3 settings to control inactivity timeout:

    1) FORMS_TIMEOUT environment variable.

    2) HeartBeat applet parameter.

    3)The session-timeout parameter of the forms servlet in the web.xml configuration file.

1) FORMS_TIMEOUT environment variable:

This is an environment variable that is set in the .env file found $ORACLE_HOME/forms/server/default.env. The default is set to use a file called default.env file but this can be customized in the formsweb.cfg found in $ORACLE_HOME/forms/server/formsweb.cfg  to use .env files for each configuration in which case these should be modified instead of default.env.

Please note: The Forms environment variable FORMS_TIMEOUT is referred to as FORMS90_TIMEOUT in version IAS 9i and 10g R1 (9.0.4) it is in OAS 10g R2 (10.0.1.2) it is FORMS_TIMEOUT.

Add a row to the end of the file such as:

FORMS_TIMEOUT=30

The default value for forms timeout is 15 and Valid Values range from  3 to 1440 (1 day).

This parameter specifies the amount of time in elapsed minutes before the Form Services process is terminated when there is no client communication with the Form Services. Client communication can come from the user doing some work, or from the Forms Client heartbeat if the user is not actively using the form.

2) HeartBeat applet parameter:

The HeartBeat parameter is a feature of the applet and it is set in the formsweb.cfg file found in $ORACLE_HOME/forms/server/formsweb.cfg .

This parameter is used to set the frequency at which a client sends a packet to the server to indicate that it is still running. We can define this integer value in minutes or infractions of minutes, for example, 0.5 for 30 seconds. The default is two minutes.

Please note: If the heartbeat is less than FORMS_TIMEOUT, the user’s session will be kept alive, even if they are not actively using the form. HeartBeat is recommended to be at least 2 beats smaller than FORMS_TIMEOUT

In the formweb.cfg file add the following line to the configuration of your choice:

heartBeat=12

The default value for HeartBeat is 2 and Valid Values range from  1 to 1440 (1 day)

3)The session-timeout  parameter of the forms servlet in the web.xml configuration file:

This file defines the OC4J forms & listener servlet definitions, including servlet parameters and session configuration. The file is found
$ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/OC4J_BI_Forms/applications/formsapp/formsweb/WEB-INF/web.xml

The value of session-timeout refers to the maximum amount of inactivity that a single session can have before it is automatically invalidated by the server.

Please note: The value of should be the same as FORMS_TIMEOUT.

The following lines must be added to web.xml.

……
……

60

networkRetries applet parameter

Besides the above timeout parameters, there are additional reasons that forms maybe disconnecting that are not timeout based but network related. Usually they are prefaced by error FRM-92102: A network error has occurred. The Forms Client has attempted to reestablish its connection to the Server 5  time(s) without success.  This parameter specifies the number of times the Forms client should try reconnecting to the middle-tier before finally timing out. The Oracle Forms network connection to the server is a little picky as it does not like being ignored. So as such if it tries to reach the server more than 5 times without response it dies. Although this would seem logical most of the time 5 seconds is just too little if we take into consideration that there maybe database performance issues or network waits.

To add tolerance to Forms patience thay have added a great parameter called ‘networkRetries’ to the forms configuration file $ORACLE_HOME/forms/server/formsweb.cfg.  Set the value of the networkretries parameter to a suitable number according to your network characteristics needed. For example, networkRetries=30.  If the error continues to occur even after setting up an appropriate value for networkRetries, you should check firewall and proxies that may be blocking the applications server ports.