FORMS_BUILDER_CLASSPATH not set after Installation of Oracle Forms Builder 11.1.1.2.0

To add Forms 11 support to my application Forms Toolkit, I needed to install Oracle WebLogic and Oracle Developer Tools (see download information).

While the installer reported “installation complete” after a couple of minutes, it really spent about 5 hours (on my machine) installing and configuring the software. It’s best to watch the installation log file using a tool like BareTail, because the installer won’t give you much information whether it is still active and what it is doing.

After completion, I tried to start Oracle Forms Builder, but got this error message:

FRM-91129: fatal error in runtime process: no value specified for required environment variable FORMS_BUILDER_CLASSPATH

FRM-91129: Abbruchfehler: Kein Wert für erforderliche Umgebungsvariable FORMS_BUILDER_CLASSPATH angegeben

Forms 11 does not seem to be administered by earlier versions of the Oracle Home Selector, so I had to look for some clues where Forms would get its startup information from.

Open the Registry Editor (regedit.exe) and navigate to HKLM\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\ and find a number of subkeys starting with “KEY_OH”. Navigate to the key holding values for ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_HOME_KEY that point to your installation directory.

In Explorer, navigate to the forms\templates\registry directory of your installation (C:\oracle\Middleware\as_1\forms\templates\registry in my case), and open the file formsbuilder.reg in your favorite editor and save under a different name (e.g. my_formsbuilder.reg).

Delete all lines between “REGEDIT4” and the first line containing the %ORACLE_HOME_REG_KEY% macro. The file now looks like this:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\%ORACLE_HOME_REG_KEY%]
"FORMS_SCCONVERT"="false"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\%ORACLE_HOME_REG_KEY%]
"FORMS_SCDRIVER"="d2scrw32.dll" 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\%ORACLE_HOME_REG_KEY%]
"FORMS_SCVIEWER"="NOTEPAD.EXE" 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\%ORACLE_HOME_REG_KEY%]
"FORMS_ORACLE_INSTANCE"="%ORACLE_INSTANCE%"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\%ORACLE_HOME_REG_KEY%]
"FORMS_BUILDER_CLASSPATH"="%ORACLE_HOME%\\a\\number\\of\\jars"

Replace all occurrences of %ORACLE_HOME_REG_KEY% with the value of the registry key ORACLE_HOME_KEY, e.g.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\KEY_OH377519060]

Save the file, and double-click from Explorer. Acknowledge the warning that the .reg file will be merged into the registry, and the successful merge.

You can now start Oracle Forms Builder.

Note: this worked on my machine, and may not necessarily solve your problem. However, the procedure only adds 5 known keys to the registry, so it can be revoked easily.