I have a tnsnames.ora file on my local machine that contains a number of IFILE directives, which seems to cause a bunch of harmless errors in the Logging Page in SQL Developer (I'm using 1.5.4 but the behavior has been consistent since the beta releases).
My tnsnames.ora file is just a pointer to other tnsnames.ora files, i.e.
# tnsnames.ora Network Configuration File: c:\oracle\product\11.1.0\client_1\network\admin\tnsnames.ora
# Generated by Oracle configuration tools.
IFILE = c:\oracle\product\11.1.0\client_1\Network\Admin\tnsnames.ora.project1
IFILE = c:\oracle\product\11.1.0\client_1\Network\Admin\tnsnames.ora.clientFoo
This makes it easier for me to have client- or project-specific TNSNames.ora files that I can share (or borrow) from other folks without manually editing a single giant file that mixes information from multiple clients.
Whenever I open up SQL Developer, I get an error in the Logging Page at the bottom of the screen for each IFILE entry where
Level = SEVERE
Sequence = 53
Elapsed = 63
Source = oracle.dbtools.raptor.utils.TNSHelper
Message = ifile not found c:\oracle\product\11.1.0\client_1\Network\Admin\tnsnames.ora.project1
So far as I can tell, this doesn't cause any problems for me-- I can happily connect to all the databases. Of course, I'd love to be able to avoid generating all those errors every time.
Justin