Editing Oracle Forms (section)

=== Forms 3.x ===
Oracle Forms 3 was the first version to allow PL/SQL to be used within Forms triggers and procedures/SQL Functions could also be used as an undocumented feature.

Forms 3 was a character mode application and was primarily used in terminals such as Digital VT220 and PCs running Microsoft DOS.  It could run under [[X window system|X]] but did not support any X interface-specific features such as [[checkbox]]es, so it was basically a character mode application running in a GUI window.

Although a mouse could be used to click on fields, there were no mouse specific triggers (such as when-mouse-double click) available in this release.

The source file was an *.INP ASCII file. The runtime file was an *.FRM binary file.

The IDE was greatly improved to allow editing of PL/SQL code, and this reduced the common practice of editing the INP source file directly.

Forms 3 automatically generated Forms triggers and code to support some [[database constraint]]s such as primary keys and foreign keys. Constraints could be defined, but not [[wikt:enforce|enforce]]d in the Oracle 6 database at this time, so Oracle used Forms 3 to claim that it supported constraints in its technology stack.