Deploying APEX: showing an “Under Maintenance” web page

systemdown

I’ve added this script to our toolbelt for future upgrades. We have a friendly “System is under maintenance, sorry for any convenience” web page that we want to show to users while we run upgrades, and we want it to be shown even if we’re just doing some database schema changes.

So I took the script from here and adapted it slightly, here’s our version:

declare PRAGMA AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION;
  v_workspace CONSTANT VARCHAR2(100) := 'MYSCHEMA';
  v_workspace_id NUMBER;
begin
  select workspace_id into v_workspace_id
  from apex_workspaces where workspace = v_workspace;
  apex_application_install.set_workspace_id (v_workspace_id);
  apex_util.set_security_group_id
    (p_security_group_id => apex_application_install.get_workspace_id);
  wwv_flow_api.set_flow_status
    (p_flow_id             => 100
    ,p_flow_status         => 'UNAVAILABLE_URL'
    ,p_flow_status_message => 'http://www.example.com/system_unavailable.html'
    );
  commit;
end;
/

It uses an autonomous transaction because we want the system to be unavailable immediately for all users while the deployment is running.

Warning: WWV_FLOW_API is an undocumented package so this is not supported.

The opposite script to make the application available again is:

declare PRAGMA AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION;
  v_workspace CONSTANT VARCHAR2(100) := 'MYSCHEMA';
  v_workspace_id NUMBER;
begin
  select workspace_id into v_workspace_id
  from apex_workspaces where workspace = v_workspace;
  apex_application_install.set_workspace_id (v_workspace_id);
  apex_util.set_security_group_id
    (p_security_group_id => apex_application_install.get_workspace_id);
  wwv_flow_api.set_flow_status
    (p_flow_id             => 100
    ,p_flow_status         => 'AVAILABLE'
    );
  commit;
end;
/

However, if we run the f100.sql script to deploy a new version of the application, we don’t need to run the “set available” script since the redeployment of the application (which would have been exported in an “available” state already) will effectively make it available straight away.

UPDATE FOR APEX 5.1 and later

The APEX API has been updated with a documented and supported call – APEX_UTIL.set_application_status to do this which should be used in APEX 5.1 or later.

Estimating APEX Development
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