Automatically Backuping Apex Applications

Automatically Backuping Apex Applications

We can export our apex applications as an sql file in “Home>Application Builder>Application $ID>Export / Import>Export” menu. You can do this as manually, so if you want to backup your apex application(s) you should do this for each time for each application.

As you guess this operation runs a plsql command in background to export application.

“wwv_flow_utilities” public package of apex, includes “export_application_to_clob” function that returns clob variable that containts sql statements. These sql statements those are application metadata that will be imported your workspace. Spec part of function is below :

function export_application_to_clob (
p_application_id in number,
p_export_saved_reports in varchar2 default ‘N’)
return clob
;

Application ID is a number that user specified or automatically got from apex. That is on right of f?p= parameter of url string. You should specify application id to export application. Another parameter is p_export_saved_reports is optional, if you want to export saved report you can set this as ‘Y’.

You can write a dbms_scheduler job that runs this plsql for every specified interval time. Or you can write a unix shell script that produces an sql file, put this shell script to crontab to run this backup operations for every specified interval time. Or anything else…

Also you can export only a page of an application, this function is under wwv_flow_utilities package too, spec part of this :

function export_page_to_clob (
p_application_id in number,
p_page_id in number)
return CLOB
;

Example :

CREATE TABLE EXPORT_CLOB
(
APP_EXPORT CLOB
);

BEGIN

INSERT INTO EXPORT_CLOB
VALUES (WWV_FLOW_UTILITIES.EXPORT_APPLICATION_TO_CLOB(‘107’));

END;

SELECT length(app_export) FROM EXPORT_CLOB;

954956

To backup your all of applications you can get application id from “select * from apex_applications”.

This example was tested on Oracle 11.1.0.6 and Apex 3.2.