Access forms 11g port number

Question

Hi,
Is there any way of getting the forms port number inside forms? I am running Forms 11.1.2.1.
Use case: The forms need to open up a help page in a new browser window. In my case, the forms are embedded inside an ADF page, which is running on a different port. By default, WEB.SHOW_DOCUMENT takes the port number of the hosting page. However, all the help files are located in a folder inside the forms server.
One way is to put the forms URL as a parameter inside the env file and then access the same through forms, but that becomes a matter of user configuration. If possible I would like to use an out-of-the-box solution.
Regards,
Anirban

Answer 1

Ok, now I am confused. You suggested that the ADF environment/server is not the same as where Forms lives. So, there would be only two (maybe three) ways in which you could "embed" a form (java applet) into a web page. You can either hard code the applet parameters into the hosting page or create something like an IFrame within the page and use the typical url to call it. The third option could be to use java script to actually write the desired html dynamically (I won't get into these details).
In the first option, you would need to fully qualify parameters such as serverURL, archive, etc because the information needed for Forms lives on another server or in a different environment. And in this case, WEB.SHOW_DOCUMENT would also need to be fully qualified (i.e. http://formserver:8888/forms/html/myhelp) again because the hosting page did not come from the same server as the form. The behavior would be exactly the same regardless of whether the call was made by Forms or any other application not originating from the same environment. This is not a "Forms" issue.
In the second option, if you use an iFrame the WEB.SHOW_DOCUMENT call would use the server and port which launched the form in the iFrame. In other words, if the surrounding page (e.g. ADF) was called using http://abc:8888, but the form displayed in the iFrame was called using http://xyz:7777, WEB.SHOW_DOCUMENT calls could successfully use a relative path rather than fully qualified. For example,
<blockquote>WEB.SHOW_DOCUMENT('/forms/html/myhelp','_blank');</blockquote>
In general, WEB.SHOW_DOCUMENT would always use the url responsible for launching it in the first place. This would be true of any html or java app if you provided only a relative path rather than fully qualifying. Keep in mind that Oracle Forms does not perform any magic when calling WEB.SHOW_DOCUMENT. This is merely a call to Java's showDocument method. Here is demo from java:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/browser.html
So I guess what I am saying is that it is unclear as to how you are "embedding" your form into the page and what exactly you are trying to do with WEB.SHOW_DOCUMENT