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Overview
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Overview

OWA_PATTERN is a PL/SQL package owned by the SYS schema and delivered as part of the Oracle-supplied OWA (Oracle Web Agent) toolkit that ships with the Oracle database and is therefore available to every Oracle E-Business Suite instance running 12.1.1 or 12.2.2. Its business function is entirely infrastructural rather than functional: it provides a general-purpose pattern-matching engine used to locate, extract, and transform substrings within character data. The package implements a lightweight regular-expression facility that predates, and is independent of, the native REGEXP_* SQL functions introduced in Oracle Database 10g. Status of the object in ETRM is VALID, confirming that it is compiled and operational in the reference environment.

Because OWA_PATTERN resides in SYS and is exposed through a PUBLIC synonym also named OWA_PATTERN, it is callable from any schema in the EBS database without qualifying the owner. This design reflects its role as shared plumbing for other OWA components.

Key Procedures and Functions

The ETRM metadata documents fifteen procedures and functions, of which the following four are explicitly named. Their canonical signatures are not reproduced here; only their purposes are described.

  • GETPAT — Compiles a pattern specification into an internal representation that the matching routines can consume. It is the entry point for callers that intend to reuse a pattern repeatedly rather than re-parsing it on each invocation.
  • MATCH — Performs a pattern match against a supplied source string and reports whether, and where, the pattern is satisfied. It is the primary workhorse for exact positional matching.
  • AMATCH — Provides the anchored or attribute-oriented variant of the matching operation, used where matching must be constrained to a defined starting point or boundary rather than scanning the entire input.
  • CHANGE — Rewrites the portions of a string that satisfy a pattern, substituting replacement text. This supports bulk text transformation of the kind required when generating or reformatting HTML output.

The remaining documented subprograms are overloads and helper routines supporting these four operations.

Tables Accessed

OWA_PATTERN does not access any application tables. ETRM records no referenced tables via APPS synonyms, which is consistent with its nature as an in-memory string-processing utility. All state is held in PL/SQL variables and scalar data types. Its only compile-time dependencies are on the STANDARD package and on SYS.OWA_TEXT, which supplies character-handling primitives. Consequently, the package performs no DML and generates no redo or undo associated with EBS business data.

Usage Notes

OWA_PATTERN is not exposed through Oracle Forms or concurrent programs in standard EBS functionality. It is invoked programmatically: by other OWA packages, by PL/SQL Server Pages and mod_plsql procedures, and by custom code that requires pattern matching without a database round trip. ETRM records that it is referenced by one other package, SYS.OWA_MATCH, and by itself. In EBS 12.1.1 and 12.2.2 the package remains relevant chiefly for legacy customizations and for Oracle's own toolchain. New development should prefer native regular-expression support, but existing code that calls OWA_PATTERN must continue to respect SYS ownership, the PUBLIC synonym, and the EXECUTE grants inherited from the OWA toolkit.