Open Document Link - Oracle Purchasing

Scope:

Oracle Purchasing - Version: 11.5.10 to 11.5.10.4

Issue:

On performing the following steps:

- Create a purchase order or purchase requisition that is over the requestors' approval limit
- Submit the document for approval.
- Approver logs into i-Procurement or Oracle Purchasing
- Selects on notifications options to look at all approval notifications in queue.
- The approver tries to open the document via the "Open Document" link.

The page takes forever to process that request and nothing happens (The document does not open in the expected Oracle Form)

We faced this issue while upgrading to 11.5.10.2 from 11.5.10. And it recurred while we moved our single node instance to two nodes, by separating the Web and Forms node.

Cause:

The forms appears to 'hang' because the link is executing in a hidden iframe, so you never see the error that is actually occuring. The actual error that is occurring behind the scenes is:

Oracle Forms Web CGI: Error detected
Your request cannot be serviced at this time due to the following error:

Error:
URL Contains One or More Restricted Characters
This error is occurring because some characters are incorrectly being blocked.

Solution:

There is a patch for the issue (5447522) but we went for the workaround which is to comment out the variable FORMS60_BLOCK_URL_CHARACTERS in apps.conf and bounce the Apache.