One of my main irks with Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB)

One of my main irks with Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) is the lame messages you receive. I mean seriously, they can leave you with a sense of what hell does that mean and frustration to the point of pulling your hair out.

My case in point today was I had a function with a parameter that returns back a number that is to be used in a wait activity (figure 1). Sound simple enough doesn’t? Wrong. So you can see in figure2 the parameter for the function. And in Figure 3 you can see the binding of wait time to this return parameter.

figure 1

figure 2




















figure 3

Validation of the map was ok. I then deployed the map but that failed. The reason?

GEAP_WRK CreateError RPE-02040: Internal error: P_NWAIT_BETWEEN_EXTRACTS cannot be converted to a constant value. Please correct the value. If the problem persists then please contact Oracle Support with the stack trace and details on how to reproduce it.

See what I mean, this helps no one understand what the problem is or how to fix it. Fortunately I have run across this problem before so I pretty much know what to do. In this case you need to create a process flow variable and bind the parameter to this value. Then you need to bind the wait time property to this variable.