First dabblings with APEXlang

Obviously there are plenty of folks in the Oracle APEX team with waaaayy more experience in APEXlang than I have, so this isn’t an in-depth expose into all of the nuts and bolts of APEXlang. For that, I recommend you check out the AskTOM Live sessions where the APEX team are holding regular deep-dives on all the cool things in APEX 26.1

This is just a quick tip just in case you hit the same hiccup I did when using APEXlang and the latest SQLcl version for the first time.

After playing around in my LLM and building my first simple starter APEX app, I zipped up my source code folder and went to import into APEX using the new “apex import” command in SQLcl, and unfortunately things didn’t go to plan

X:>sql.exe myuser/mypass@//localhost:1530/pdb21a
SQLcl: Release 26.1 Production on Wed May 27 11:52:48 2026
Copyright (c) 1982, 2026, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
Connected to:
Oracle Database 21c Enterprise Edition Release 21.0.0.0.0 - Production
Version 21.21.0.0.0
SQL> apex import -input starter.zip
ORA-17012: Parameter type conflict: sqlType=2
https://docs.oracle.com/error-help/db/ora-17012/

After a little digging around, I discovered that I had set various environment variables on my system to have SQLcl use a thick oracle client.

If you hit the same error as I did above, simply switch to the thin client, and you’ll be good to go!

           |=====|
X:>sql.exe -thin myuser/mypass@//localhost:1530/pdb21a

SQLcl: Release 26.1 Production on Wed May 27 11:53:12 2026

Copyright (c) 1982, 2026, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Connected to:
Oracle Database 21c Enterprise Edition Release 21.0.0.0.0 - Production
Version 21.21.0.0.0

SQL> cd X:dataapexaistarter-app
SQL> apex import -input starter.zip
Importing application ID: 212 into workspace: WSPACE
Import successful.

Now then … get into APEXlang and start AI-ing your APEX apps!