APEX 20.2 causes an ORDS bad request response when friendly URL is turned on. So far it looks like it has something to do with BLOB in a table to trigger it.
At least since november 2020 I'm experiencing an unexplainable bad request error when developing some personal apps on my Free Tier Oracle Cloud. I could not figure out what was causing it. I wanted to redo my app from scratch in the newest APEX 20.2, which I do to try out new features. This app contains a file repository (table with a BLOB in it). When I tried to reacreate the page in 20.2 no many how many times, in how many different way I tried to create an IR based on this table, it would always lead to 404: BAD REQUEST, when trying to render the page. I tried a 19C db, I tried a 21C db, I tried starting/stopping the db's. Tried googling it. Nothing worked, till the point I had given up on using my Oralce APEX cloud and was about to go back to setting up an XE instance again on my home server.
Since a few weeks at my workplace we upgraded from 5.1 to 20.2 and we have this weird issue, where all our apps migrated perfectly. After migration we started upgrading our apps, latest themes etc, but as soon as we turn on friendly URL we get a 404 bad request: No connection to db or something. We haven't been able to work this out yet and the DBA's already told us we need Oracle Support on this, as everything is by the book, but still these errors remain.
Also even when friendly URL is switched off, some pluging do not work. It turns out this is APEX, although turned off, internally does employ some sort of friendly URL like syntax to get static files for those plugings, which you can also see for this nifty file. The APP-icon.css. This app has friendly URL turned off. But as you can see APEX still uses similar friendly url syntax to get the file. And there it is the 404 again
<link rel="stylesheet" href="r/personal_apps/29401/files/static/v3/app-icon.css?version=Release%201.0" type="text/css" />
So today I pieced it all together: Files.... which are stored in blob's => friendly URL => ERROR
I got back to my own free tier playground an opened the apps that failed me for the last 4 months. Turned off "friendly URL"(which had been switched on default as I started from scratch)......
IT WORKS!!!! No more errors. Friendly URL is the root of all evil!!!
Ergo: APEX 20.2. has a serieus issue with friendly URL as which at least to my knowledge occurs for any URL that fetched file/blob related content.
Why don't I see many more people experiencing the same?