...loading APP files in HFM

I have not posted any thoughts recently because I am working on an amazing migration to the Cloud project and I spend most of my time there. However, recently I got in a situation which reminded me of a discussion that I had a few months ago in OTN. The discussion was related with issues that users had with loading APP files in their upgraded applications.

In my case, we were working on upgrading the applications from 11.1.2.1 to 11.1.2.4. We followed the process suggested by Oracle and we upgraded 11.1.2.1 to 11.1.2.3 and then moved the applications to 11.1.2.4. When I started testing the upgraded applications I found that in one out of the three applications it was not possible to extract and reload the extracted metadata without corrupting the application.

The load check integrity log file showed hundreds of errors due to change in the metadata and we had no clue on why this happened. On the other side, I was able to load the xml version of the metadata file and an APP version of the metadata that I was producing from the metadata manager that I have developed in excel.

For some unknown reason, I did not panic and I spent a few days trying to understand why…

Now, I believe that when you use APP files to load metadata, HFM engine will transform the APP file to XML format and load the transformed file in the HFM tables. If your APP file cannot be properly transformed to XML then you either get an error message that your file does not have the correct format or you get hundreds of error messages during the integrity check (like in my case).

In my case, when I compared the file that I created and the file that I extracted from the application, I found that a couple of descriptions had unknown characters. Changing these characters and reloading the file with the Replace option solved the issue and we have now a fully working HFM application.

Thank you for reading,

Thanos