This was something that was flagged in the forum a while back by Joe T, but I’ve been working with a client on 11.5.9 who has just hit the same problem.

There is a bug in 11.5.9 that means that occasionally a workflow notification will error with the following error
ERROR
Error - ORA-06502:
PL/SQL: numeric or value error ORA-06512: at "APPS.WF_NOTIFICATION", line 4995
ORA-06512: at line 5

This seems to happen when the action history for an item key exceeds a given limit – the breakpoint seems to be about 30 items, but it could be more or less (Oracle are no more or less specific on the threshold!). The error message appears instead of the actual notification – not something that you want your users to see!

Oracle have identified the bug that causes this as bug 4059291 – which can be resolved by applying patch 4946007. If you can’t apply the patch, then there is this workaround:

- Add an attribute called #HISTORY to the message causing the problem, and add &#HISTORY to the message body.

- If you want to view the history, then you can modify the file apwxwkfb.pls and change PROCEDURE GenerateExpClobLines:
l_line_accounting_enabled VARCHAR2(1);
to
l_line_accounting_enabled VARCHAR2(30);

Once you have made the change, bounce Apache and then re-test it.

This fix is approved by Oracle, and is documented in this note on Metalink.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Oracle, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.