Running Oracle Reports via a client using system.exec call from war file

Question

Hi all,
I am trying to deploy a war file application to a J2EE 10.1.3 application server. The deployment successfully completes. However testing the application fails.
When testing, the application reveals that calling a Oracle Reports 6i client (using a cmd line exec) from the war file returns application errors. The errors we get from executing the call below (using debug statements), creates this error:
OperatingSystemCmd: cmd = D:\Oracle\Dev6i\BIN\rwcli60 MODULE="CLTMLST" USERID="<userid>/<pwd>@<db>" DESTYPE="FILE" DESFORMAT="PDF" DESNAME="<path>\<pdf filename>.PDF" PARAMFORM="NO" BACKGROUND="NO" SERVER="r6i.world" TOLERANCE=0 ADVCODE="<param>"
OperatingSystemCmd: Command returned 3
WrsRunReport: Done executing report
WrsRunReport: Error running report Return code 3
Error on Screen is REP-0178 : Cannot connect to reports service.
However running the same command from a operating system command prompt in windows reveals that the command runs successfully.
Is there any particular OC4J J2EE settings that are required to get this statement to run properly?
Any help is most appreciative.
Cheers
Rodney

Answer 1

Hi All,
From much research and experimenting to get this to work I looked at the java.lang.Runtime class and noticed that seperate processes can be started using this very important Java class.
The first thing that I experimented with was in regards to seeing the environment OC4J runs against. Using the java.lang.Runtime class I executed a standard "cmd /c set" command in my Windows environment, and noticed that Oracle Application Server uses its own environment and not a standard windows login environment for its OC4J containers. Apache Tomcat on the other hand uses the standard user login environment.
So to get the application to be able to work properly we needed to override the particular environment the process needed to be able to get it to work. There is a exec command which allows you to override completely the environment for a process you would like to run. This method call does not in any way shape or form change the standard OC4J environment. This was done by executing the same "set" but with the overriden environment. Note that no environment variables from the OC4J container are carried into this new environment.
Cheers
Rodney