Moving apps between databases

Question

I have a fairly complicated application that has thousands of queries all with table names with fully qualified db links built in. For instance:
select *
from [email protected]
There are lots of dynamic queries buried in PL/SQL too.
Now I want to be able to shift this application easily between our dev and prod environments and I thought I'd be able to create two application items: Fnnn_DBUSERNAME and Fnnn_DBLINK then export the application, do a global find/replace and change all the tables to &Fnnn_DBUSERNAME.tablename&Fnnn_DBLINK.
But the SQL then becomes dynamic SQL and needs to be in a PL/SQL block. So all the queries would need significant rework to insert escape characters and concatenation.
I guess when moving between dev and prod I could export the app then find all links of one type and replace them with another before importing to prod but it doesn't seem very elegant.
Is there a standard approach to making applications portable?

Answer 1

You might want to consider creating synonyms in the APEX application's parsing schema for all object references of the the type <owner>.tablename@dblink.
The values for 'owner' and 'dblink' can be chosen as appropriate for the environemnt. The application should then simply refer to the synonyms rather than the fully qualified names.
This will make moving your apps between environments easier.