Ad Relink

Continuing my series on the AD Utilities in todays post i will blog about AD Relink.

AD Relink is a utility that is used to Oracle Applications Executables the Oracle8 Server product libraries contained within the Oracle Applications Technology Stack ORACLE_HOME.

In other words AD Relink is used to regenerate an Oracle Applications executable using the Oracle Applications Tech Stack libriries.

A unique feature of AD relink is that it is not a executable like other Ad utilities it is in fact a shell script that uses the UNIX 'make' command. In windows environment therefore its important to have MKS Toolkit or CYGWIN in the path before using AD Relink.It does this by reading the product definition from the {prod}.mk file. This file is located at PROD_TOP/lib location. AD Relink will fail in case the files are missing, courupted or a newer version of the file is required.

Relinking may be required under various scenarios like an executable getting corrupt or lost. Relinking is also recommended after cloning upgrades and patching. But mostly Auto Patch will take care of the relinking process at the end of the patching.

The following is the syntax for AD Relink

adrelink.sh force={y | n} [optionalargs]

Force here is used to specify wether to relink regardless of the status of the library or object files.

Optional Args include back_mode used to specify to backup the executable before relinking.
The values for this are 'all','file'(backs up the executables metioned in the adrelinkbk.txt,this is also the default value) and 'none'.

Eg: adrelink.sh force=y “ad adpatch”

AD Relink is run after logging into the system as the 'applmgr' user and setting the environment.
The following environment variables must be set properly before using AD Relink
PATH, ORACLE_HOME,APPL_TOP, ORACLE_SID or TWO_TASK, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and SHLIB_PATH (HP specific)

Also you must use AD Relink to relink only AD executables to relink other executables it is recommended to used ADADMIN instead. Eg if you wish to Relink your FNDLIBR (Your concurrent Manager executable) you should use adadmin and choose the 'Maintain Applications Files' option, though you could do the same with AD Relink also.

By default AD Relink creates a log file of the actions performed and the errors encounterd in the linking process at the location from where the AD Relink command was run.

It is recommended that you shutdown services of the tier for whose executables you are relinking.

You cannot relink non Oracle Applications executable using AD Relink for that you must use the make command manually.
eg: make -f ins_rdbms.mk install.