Oracle eBusiness Architects

I was asked this question by a customer during a recent demonstration of Premiertec’s Integrated Workplace Management System.

IWMS – The Background

The term “Integrated Workplace Management System”, or “IWMS” (to satisfy our lust for acronyms), originated from a university academic, and was subsequently co-opted by Gartner. Up until recently, Gartner produced an IWMS market assessment, including a Gartner Magic Quadrant, and without a common term like IWMS there would have been no other way to group a load of vendors together in a comparison document.

During their initial analysis of the facilities and real estate space, it was observed that the market was moving from point solutions to integrated solutions. It was also observed that there was a trend toward defining the facilities and real estate domain more broadly as workplace management, to recognise the advent of workplace mobility and the solutions needed to manage the virtual workplace. Thus, the two trends were combined to the single acronym IWMS.

Although it is recognised that the IWMS definition is very broad, and therefore less useful to describe a market that is becoming more industry verticalized, users still need a coherent framework to evaluate vendors and market trends. Many vendors have used the IWMS blueprint provided in the IWMS market analysis containing the Magic Quadrant to enhance their products and re-align their messages.

So why do we call it IWMS?

If you type IWMS into Wikipedia you get the following description:
IWMS is an enterprise platform that supports the planning, design, management, utilization and disposal of an organisation’s location based assets. IWMS systems assist organisations in optimizing the use of workplace resources, including the management of a company’s real estate portfolio, infrastructure and facilities assets. Four of the primary areas of functionality include Lease Administration, Project Management, Space Management and Maintenance Management.

Premiertec have decided to place strategic focus on delivering the IWMS solution to market. They have therefore designed and delivered an IWMS solution which is built on the latest Oracle E-Business Suite R12.1 platform. This incorporates integration between the following modules -  Oracle Property Manager, Oracle Projects, Oracle Enterprise Asset Management, Oracle Site Hub, Oracle Service and Oracle Financials applications. Known as the Premiertec Integrated Workplace Management System (PIWMS), this solution supports the entire real estate lifecycle through a complete, end-to-end Real Estate Management solution.

George Gallant - March 2010

Recently we built a killer ADF Fusion application for one of our customers. The solution was built on time using JDeveloper 11g build 5536 (version important). We tested deployment on the integrated WebLogic server on one our Windows XP Pro laptops, deployed test WebLogic 10.3 server on Windows 2003 machine, installed matching ADF Runtime libraries and were in eager anticipation to see our creation run in a production-like environment.

Little did we know… Continue reading →

Recently a good friend of mine asked me

Why does offshore produce such a bad code?

This is not the first time I was asked this question, not to mention myself asking this question. I knew the answer for this question for the last several years, but I did not know how to make change it.

These are my findings. Continue reading →

While building a report, I was asked to print report title that matches the name of the concurrent program, date the report was executed, and the only report paremeter with its meaning.

The title of the report and execution date is simple. The parameter reads its values from an independent value set. So, I started to think how to get hold of the value set ID and what table do I need to read for the meaning, etc. And then!!! I recollected my own blog.

The resulting query is here without much explanations.

select fcr.actual_start_date report_start_date
, fcp.user_concurrent_program_name
, fu.user_name submitted_by
, fcr.argument1 parameter_code
, oe_sys_parameters_util.get_value(fdfcu.flex_value_set_id, fcr.argument1) parameter_description
from fnd_concurrent_requests fcr
, fnd_concurrent_programs_vl fcp
, fnd_user fu
, FND_DESCR_FLEX_COL_USAGE_VL fdfcu
where fcr.concurrent_program_id = fcp.concurrent_program_id
and fcr.requested_by = fu.user_id
and fdfcu.descriptive_flexfield_name = ‘$SRS$.’|| fcp.concurrent_program_name
and fdfcu.application_column_name = ‘ATTRIBUTE1′
and fcr.request_id = fnd_global.conc_request_id

While doing research for the next release of Hermes, Premiertec’s flagship project management tool, I came across a task where I had to parse a string like

apps.xxpt_chain_controller_pkg.execute

into procedure name, package name and optional schema name. To achieve this I had to count the number of dots in the string.

Being naturally lazy, I decided to give Internet a spin and find a ready answer. To my dismay, all the ready-to-go answers were PL/SQL procedures of questionable quality. The ingenuity of developers did not go beyond reading the string symbol by symbol and, literally, counting dots.

If you are interviewing a PL/SQL developer, please, use this example as an interview question with the proper answer as

select length(p_string) – length(replace(p_string, ‘.’)) from dual

Writing Java Concurrent Program
Any Java class that implements interface oracle.apps.fnd.cp.request.JavaConcurrentProgram can be registered as a concurrent program.

The only method which needs to be implemented is

public void runProgram(oracle.apps.fnd.cp.request.CpContext cpcontext)

CpContext provides developer with all attributes of a PL/SQL concurrent program such as output file, log file, and return status plus a database connection. A typical implementation of this method looks like Continue reading →

Storing CLOB in database table
Once we have the input stream converted into an ASCII string, we need to store it in the custom table. To perform this operation, we need to generate primary key, and extract the purpose for the upload.

We already discussed the query which generated globally unique primary key, and creation of a view object PrimaryKeyGeneratorVO based on this query. The method which generates the primary key becomes

protected Number generatePrimaryKey()
{
OAViewObject viewObject = getPrimaryKeyGeneratorVO();
viewObject.setMaxFetchSize(1);
viewObject.executeQuery();
return (Number) (viewObject.first().getAttribute(”Id”));
}

Continue reading →

Converting Excel to CSV
There are several open source and commercial Java libraries that are capable of reading Excel workbooks. Among those are Apache POI , JExcelAPI, JCom, ExtenXLS7 to name a few. We will use JExcelAPI to recognize and process Excel files. Continue reading →

Building UI
First of all, we need to define business objects and explain their usage. The page we are building contains one field on top of the page where the user specifies the file to upload, and then a table below where user select the purpose for the upload. Continue reading →

Technical Design
We build a new OAF page for the user to specify the file to upload. Since we are building a generic mechanism, the user also specifies the purpose of the upload. For example, price lists, or project budgets, or manual invoices. The list of purposes is presented as a table with name and description of the purpose for the upload. An advanced implementation can also display a URL for the file template which users can download and populate with data. Continue reading →