Oracle eBusiness Architects

One of our recruiters was asked by a customer why it was difficult to find the right skills for an Oracle E-Business Suite project. It felt like a strange question to hear in the current economic climate - especially while so many IT professionals are affected by unemployment - but he had a point, there will always be Oracle skills that are hard to find. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

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 →