If you've got your Release 12 environment up and running already, there's some good news to boot:
Oracle JDeveloper 10g with OA Extension (Patch 5856648) is available on Oracle MetaLink.
Also see Metalink Note 391554.1 Oracle Application Framework Documentation Resources, Release 12
Good to see Oracle a few days ahead of the release launch and Steven Chan keeping his blog current! Oracle eBusiness Suite Release 12 Available Looking forward to seeing it in action!
In one of my earlier posts, I rehashed a couple of terms that I'd heard at a recent event Digital Immigrant vs Digital Native. After having a conversion with one of my colleagues about the expansion of phone numbers due to the increase in VoIP technology, and the limits in the range of IP Address, we came to the conclusion that there will be a way to determine whether one is a Digital Immigrant or Native: Digital Natives will have an "IP address" assigned to them at birth! With the advent and intersection of mobile devices, GPS, Google Maps and the inevitable tracking application that ensues, will we be referring to the flashing little red dot friends on our mobile device screens as Jane Doe or 141.146.8.66.x? Food for thought.
There is alot of hype and expectation being generated around Oracle XML Publisher and the use of it within the Oracle eBusiness Suite (Oracle Applications).
Having developed a number of reports with it specifically for Customer facing documentation, I can safely say some of this hype is deserved. The major benefit of the product from my perspective is the separation of the data and presentation.
Combine this with the ability to take an Oracle Reports report, switch it into XML mode without change, and feed the output into Oracle XML Publisher an you have a very attractive package. Of course, the ability to output the given data into a variety of formats is also immensely beneficial. This has long been a drawback of concurrent manager based Oracle Applications reports and so the ability to output a report to Microsoft Word, Excel, PDF is also excellent.
However, at the end of the day it is just another reporting tool. It has its quirkiness, limitations and suitability for given scenarios.
Some of the considerations having used the product are:
More and more I am finding that the work required to develop customizations to, and maintain Oracle Applications is decreasing. The right decisions on tools and design make a huge difference in cost, quality and time to implement. New features such as Oracle XML Publisher, Forms Personalizations and the like need to be utilized wherever possible.
If you are wondering about the various reporting tools, what is best in a given situation, and how you can enhance the level of reporting in your enterprise, visit our Virtuate or AppsReports websites or drop me an email.
We have experience reporting with Oracle Developer(Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports), Oracle Discoverer, Oracle XML Publisher, Financial Statement Generator FSGs, Oracle Application Express (APEX) / HTML DB, Noetix, Oracle Application Desktop Integrator (ADI) amongst others.
During a stressful week I recently discovered a new way for me to work out what day of the week it is. At the start of each week I bring in 5 bananas to eat for breakfast, one for each day of the week. So I can work out what day it is based on how many bananas there are left on my desk, ie: 4 = Monday 3 = Tuesday 2 = Wednesday 1 = Thursday 0 = Friday So let's call this Gareth's Banana Calendar. That got me thinking about something in some text I was researching at the time. In the text, the author kept commenting in his text about how "the perceptive reader would notice x,y,z" based on details he just wrote. And that got me thinking how there is a very strong relation to this and how Software Developers interpret requirements, that is in order to get the rules right they need to interpret the business rules presented to them. However the perceptive developer will not only take the rules strictly, but also apply considerations to the rules, and if there is something they consider relevant that would brake or change the rules, then they should probe further for more detailed requirements or try it out. So the perceptive developer would realize there are a number of shortcomings to consider about Gareth's Banana Rule and seek answers. E.g. How do you work out what day it is if there is a public holiday during the week? Keen to hear what anyone else thinks about Gareth's Banana Rule ;-)
If you are working with Oracle Applications, here's how you can initialize your session in whatever tool you are using to mimic the login process and pick up profile option values. The key profile option here is usually org_id so you can select from organization aware views, but it applied equally to other profile options, i.e. you can then use
fnd_profile.value('PROFILE_OPTION_NAME');
to get values from profile options.
You need to be logged into the database as the APPS user.
The examples set up the session for SYSADMIN user, System Administrator responsibility.
e.g. SQL*Plus
exec fnd_global.apps_initialize(0,20420,1);e.g. for PL/SQL, TOAD, SQLDeveloper, SQL Navigator etc.:
begin fnd_global.apps_initialize(0,20420,1); end;The parameters used here are:
select 'begin fnd_global.apps_initialize(' ||
fu.user_id || ',' ||
fr.responsibility_id || ',' ||
fr.application_id || '); end;' || chr(10) || '/'
from fnd_user fu
, fnd_responsibility_tl fr
where fu.user_name = 'SYSADMIN'
and fr.responsibility_name = 'System Administrator';
b) In your Oracle Applications forms session.
Login as your user and navigate to the required responsibility.
Open a function that uses Oracle forms
Go to Help > Diagnostics > Examine
In the Block enter $PROFILES$
In the field enter the appropriate field name for the parameter:
Voila!
Here is a simple way to provide chronological tracing, debugging or auditing of Oracle PL/SQL code, by inserting a minimally intrusive, no affect to session concurrency, non erroring code. You put calls to the procedure in your code and output will be written to file /usr/tmp/SID_debug.log if the code below is used exactly as is, where SID is your instance name. It works on Oracle 9i or higher, including 10g and Oracle XE database on Unix/Linux - change the directory as required for Windows, this directory must be included in database parameter utl_file_dir and the database needs to have been restarted if utl_file_dir is changed. To get the value utl_file_dir run the query:
select value from v$parameter where name = 'utl_file_dir';You can call the procedure like this
mods_log('Hello, world!'); in PL/SQL.
e.g. for database trigger or PL/SQL code
begin mods_log('Hello, world!'); end;
e.g. for SQL*Plus
exec mods_log('Hello, world!');
Here is the code to create the procedure:
create or replace procedure mods_log (pText varchar2) is
pragma autonomous_transaction;
vFP utl_file.file_type;
vFileName varchar2(20);
vTime varchar2(11);
begin
select lower(instance_name) || '_debug.log'
, to_char(sysdate,'MMDDHH24MISS ')
into vFileName
, vTime
from v$instance;
vFP := utl_file.fopen('/usr/tmp',vFileName,'a',6000);
utl_file.put(vFP,vTime || pText);
utl_file.fclose(vFP);
exception
when others then
null; -- Do not report any errors for this procedure call
end;
/
For Oracle Applications tracing User/forms to database trace files in user_dump_dest (udump): System Admin > Profile > System At User level set profile option: Initialization SQL Statement - Custom Value:
BEGIN FND_CTL.FND_SESS_CTL('','','TRUE','TRUE','',''); END;
Or if you also want to have the user name in the file name (replace OPERATIONS with your username):
BEGIN FND_CTL.FND_SESS_CTL('','','TRUE','TRUE','','ALTER SESSION SET TRACEFILE_IDENTIFIER = OPERATIONS MAX_DUMP_FILE_SIZE = 5000000 EVENTS ='||''''||' 10046 TRACE NAME CONTEXT FOREVER, LEVEL 12'||'''');END;
Voila!
Okay, first of the "handy techie" posts. TRACING Oracle users activity: (This is handy if you are trying to see what a third party app is doing and have no access to the code!) NB: This will log all future sessions for that user, so make sure you're the only one on the system for the schema:
sqlplus /nolog connect / as sysdba; create or replace trigger APPSTRACE after logon on apps.schema begin execute immediate 'ALTER SESSION SET SQL_TRACE TRUE'; end; / REM To disable once finshed: alter trigger appstrace disable;
