Apex upgrade from 3.2 to 4.2

A bit of background on how we came to do this upgrade which started out as not an Apex upgrade at all.....

The plan was to just patch from 11.2.0.2.0 to 11.2.0.3.7 - simple enough we thought and indeed other than jumping through the usual upgrade hoops everything was running fine. All of the database components had been upgraded by the catupgrd.sql script - all that remained was Apex. SHould be easy right....

wrong.....

in our cases it chugged away for a few mins then spat out this:

Error creating page name="Page Zero" id="0" ORA-02291: integrity constraint
(APEX_040200.WWV_FLOW_STEP_UI_FK) violated - parent key not found


Hmm don;t like that then it crashed out - liked that even less.

It seemed that the migration from 3.2 to 4.2 had hit a 4.2 bug and there was very little we could do about it at this point, rerunning the upgrd script would almost certainly produce the same error and restoring and starting from scratch wouldn't help either.

We considered 'fudging' the upgrade to 'hide' APEX from the upgrade script but we didnt want to mess around with the upgrade scripts or any of the dictionary information.

We decided therefore to do workspace/application exports of everything at 3.2, drop 3.2 completely using the scripts and then install 4.2 and import everything in.

And thats what we did - seems to be OK so far - couple of funnies/quirks as we also switched to EPG as part of the move. But so far so good....

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