ORA-00972: Identifier Too Long Error When Downloading Apex Reports Into PDF with ORDS Print Server (Doc ID 2619822.1)

Last updated on FEBRUARY 09, 2023

Applies to:

Symptoms

We are getting errors while downloading the APEX reports into PDF format. After download we do see an error message while opening the pdf file, "Adobe Acrobat Reader could not open xyz.pdf because it is either not a supported file type or the file has been damaged".

When I check the debugger I see the following errors:
ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error ORA-06512: at "APEX_050000.WWV_FLOW_RENDER_QUERY", line 818 ORA-00972: identifier is too long

From tomcat - Catalina.out I see below errors.
22-Oct-2019 15:49:00.658 SEVERE [http-nio-8080-exec-10] oracle.dbtools.apex.hooks.postProcess.FOP2PDF.postProcess String index out of range: -1
java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: -1
  at java.lang.String.substring(String.java:1960)
  at oracle.dbtools.apex.hooks.postProcess.FOP2PDF.requestTOPDF(FOP2PDF.java:106)
  at oracle.dbtools.apex.hooks.postProcess.FOP2PDF.postProcess(FOP2PDF.java:75)
  at oracle.dbtools.apex.hooks.ProcessorRegistry.postProcess(ProcessorRegistry.java:55)

This is happening for few reports, but not all.

Further analysis shows that the main difference between the reports which are working vs. not working is the number of columns.
If the number of columns is trimmed, then the report works as expected.

Cause

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