Submit background job in APEX -- count on all_jobs return shadow jobs.

Question

Hi, I am trying to submit a job in APEX. The setups are as below:
On Submit - After Computation and Validations
Run Process: Once Per Page Visit
Process:
DECLARE
v_instance_cnt NUMBER;
job_no NUMBER;
BEGIN
SELECT COUNT(0)
INTO v_instance_cnt
FROM user_jobs
WHERE what LIKE 'pagl_refresh.master_refresh%';
IF NVL(v_instance_cnt,0) = 0 THEN
DBMS_JOB.SUBMIT(job_no, 'pagl_refresh.master_refresh('''||:G_BSYS_USER_NAME||''');');
:P3_MESSAGE:= 'Job has submitted. Number is '||TO_CHAR(job_no);
ELSE
:P3_MESSAGE :='The refresh is in progress. Please wait ... ('||to_char(v_instance_cnt);
END IF;
END;
Now, if I run the process, the :P3_MESSAGE message returns "'The refresh is in progress. Please wait ... (5)." . This is due to the count is 5 instead of expected 0.
If I SELECT count(*) FROM dba_jobs WHERE lower(what) LIKE 'pagl_refresh.master_refresh%'; in SQLPLUS, it returns 0. Same result from all_jobs as well.
My suspect is that it returns job counts include those that has been removed before. Yet, how APEX can see this? Does APEX use some special way to look into Job queue?
Please help
Thanks

Answer 1

From the looks of it, the job is being submitted and run - although I would check the elapsed time to see if it's anywhere close to the 20-30 minutes you anticipate. Assuming not, I would suggest that the problem is in one of the following areas:
1. The way in which you are passing in the arguments is not conforming to the expected input format or values and it's therefore not executing as expected.
2. Your process implictly relies on the state of your apex application in some manner, which is not being reproduced within the procedure when the job is submitted.
In the former case, I would check the procedure's specification against the page items types being passed in - you might have to explicitly convert some of your arguments into the appropriate type
In the latter case, well... bearing in mind that we don't know what your procedure looks like and it's therefore kind of difficult to diagnose the problem, you'll possibly need to pass your session information into the procedure as additional parameters and re-create your session from within the code.