Autoconfig

An Oracle Applications instance has its configuration details that are stored and used in multiple files. Managing these configurations manually would have been a night mare without autoconfig. My friends who have worked with 11.0.3 and earlier versions would understand the pain better than anyone else. Though in 11.0.3 the number of configuration files were numbered and could be tracked with a little effort.

But not so in the case of 11i.Thankfully we have autoconfig to do up the messy job for us now.

Autoconfig is a utility which is shipped with the latest releases of Oracle Applications that manages all the configuration files in oracle Applications.

Autoconfig has been defined by oracle 'as a tool which that simplifies and standardizes configuration management tasks in an Oracle Applications environment'.

But where does autoconfig get the configuration information from? For this autoconfig relies on a file called the context file.

The context file is an XML file in the format [sid]_[hostname].xml.This xml file stores all the configuration details of your oracle applications system like the web port number, database names etc.

There are separate context files for the database tier and the applications tier.

The [context_name] variable used here is an equivalent of [sid]_[hostname]

The location of the context file on the application tier is

$APPL_TOP/admin/[context_name].xml

The location of the context file for the databse tier is

$ORACLE_HOME/appsutil/[context_name].xml

Additionally if the applications is spread across multiple nodes each node will have its separate context file.

Autoconfig reads the information that is present in theses context files and updates the corresponding configuration files like appsweb.cfg, jserv.conf to name a couple.

But how do these context files get the information from? in previous versions of Oracle Applications we had a utility called the context editor which was used to update the context files. This has now been replaced by the Oracle Applications Manager.

Context files should now be edited only through OAM and never manually.

In case the context file is lost, you can regenerate your context file using the adbldxml.pl script

Once a particular context value is updated in OAM and saved, the changes are not propagated across the configuration files till you run autoconfig.

Apart form the context file autoconfig also makes use of the template files. Each configuration files that is going to be updated by autoconfig had a corresponding template file. Autoconfig compares the value from the context file with the template file before writing into the corresponding configuration file.

Driver files are also used by autoconfig, the driver files contain specific commands that may be required to be executed to update certain values at the database level.

Autoconfig is run by executing the shell script adautocfg.sh which in turn calls for the adconfig.sh which calls the perl script adconfig.pl.

The applications environment must be set before executing autoconfig, also since autoconfig will require a connection to your database you must ensure that the database and listener is up before running autoconfig.

Autoconfig is enabled in all latest releases of 11i,in case you want to implement autoconfig to an earlier 11i instance you can follow the instructions given in metalink note 165195.1