AIA deployment error: Please set the ORACLE_HOME environment variable

When you deploy AIA project from Jdeveloper (10.1.3.x release), you usually get an error: Please set the ORACLE_HOME environment variable. Easiest way to solve is to setup dummy Oracle and AIA home on your machine. You don't need to install entire SOA or AIA suite but need to setup the directory structure as below and copy the appropriate directory content from actual AIA installation. It comes to be about 40 to 50 MB.



Once it is setup, you can setup following environment variables:

1. AIA_HOME D:\Profiles\DummyHomes\DummyAIAHome
2. ORACLE_HOME D:\Profiles\DummyHomes\DummyOracleHome
3. BPEL_HOME D:\Profiles\DummyHomes\DummyOracleHome\bpel

Once Jdeveloper is restarted, this error should go away.

Note: it was quite obvious that something else will fail as soon as I hard code my ORACLE_HOME. It didn't take long me to find, my Oracle XE stopped working after my work station restart. I think it is good practice to not set ORACLE_HOME and set only when you need to do critical AIA deployment.

As another work around, you can only try to set AIA_HOME and BPEL_HOME, and based on build.xml file, it might just work fine, that way it doesn't cause problem with existing SOA or ORACLE DB installation on your machine.