FRM-93658 on Windows 2012 at runtime on Oracle Forms 12c Server

I don’t know about you guys but as we’ve doing more and more upgrades to 12c we’ve been seeing some bugs creeping up. So in hopes to assist in how to manage these bugs, we will be producing more posts to try to help you guys out. Thanks to Jan-Peter AuraPlayer’s Form’s Rockstar for leading the charge!

One major thing we saw today in a few customers, was a strange crash that happened sometimes at runtime only, in some specific Forms. When we would choose something from an LOV, the screen would crash with the strange error FRM-93658. We couldn’t find anything really specific on it, and again it would only happen on specific Forms, randomly and we couldn’t seem to find a specific reason why. We did notice that the problem would not reproduce on Linux. So if it’s an option for you guys to port everything onto Linux that could make everything more stable.

Luckily, we also found a magic work around for this issue that we wanted to share with you. If you convert the Form to an XML file and then convert it back and then compile it, the bug should stop happening and it will no longer crash.

You can convert the Form to XML file simply in the Forms builder by following the instructions below or you can use the script from this blog post.

To correct the error simply go into the Forms builder and in the top menu choose File => Convert > binary to xml > browse for the form you wish to convert.

Then do the same process for the reverse.

File => convert > xml to binary > browse and check overwrite !