Wednesday, December 13, 2017

MDS-01161: Reference "/apps/XXXXXXXX/.project" Has An Invalid Character "." while trying to import files into MDS for Oracle SOA Suite







While trying to import xml schema files into MDS while coding some updates to an Oracle SOA Suite composite application, the error MDS-01161 popped up.



MDS-01161  according to the Oracle Support pages is caused when there are files which start with "."(without the quotes) in the directory structure.

This importation was being done on the MDS configuration page. 



However the compressed archive I was trying to import didn't contain any files starting with "." as I had removed .DS_Store from the directory structure before compressing with Finder using the context menu.

And that is what I did wrong  - using Finder to compress the files. For some reason I didn't bother to unearth, the archive was being read differently when created using Mac OS X Finder.

Solution
The solution for me was to use the zip utility to create the archive in terminal and the import of the new archive ran without issues

zip -r archive.zip directory/