Oracle eBusiness Architects

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 →

Almost any Oracle eBusiness Suite implementation faces a requirement to upload data from Excel. Why? Sometimes, because the end users are used to Excel interface. For example, purchasing department has its own Excel template for requisitions which’s been used for years and everybody likes it and wants to keep on using it. There are also situations where Excel provides a perfect environment for data manipulation and preparation. We found this to be the case almost on all our implementation of Oracle Project Accounting with monthly updates to project budgets. Continue reading →

How many of you need to print the address of an operating unit on a custom report or OAF page? How many of you need to include the county? How many of you ended up with a query like

select haou.name organization_name, flv.meaning county
from hr_all_organization_units haou
, hr_locations_all hl
, fnd_lookup_values_vl flv
where haou.location_id = hl.location_id
and flv.lookup_type = hl.style || ‘_COUNTY’
and flv.lookup_code = hl.region_1

and learn that it does not work in Europe? Let me tell you something… Continue reading →

Consider the following simple task. The client is running Oracle eBusiness Suite release 11i or 12, and needs to print customer statements or AR dunning letters in a nice looking format with pictures, diagrams, hyperlinks, and fine print.
Definitely, we will be using BI Publisher to convert XML produced by the customer statement or dunning letter report into whatever format our client desires. The key question is: how to apply BI Publisher to customer statement output since customer statement is a spawned process which, as of time of this article, does not allow for BI Publisher template application!? Continue reading →

Quality of design documents is the perpetual issue which I had to face on every implementation I had ever had a chance to work on.
On my very first Oracle eBusiness Suite implementation project my manager asked me to paste everything, including source code at 6pt, into one big Word document to make sure nobody reads it. I am very thankful to my manager because I learned how not to write design documents and I read AIM Guidelines, both volumes. Question to the audience: who has ever seen these documents? Continue reading →

I have been always surprised how people with mediocre skill sets get on projects. It has not been once or twice when I worked on a project with consultants which could not deliver what was expected on a daily basis. They all passed screening interviews and have nice resumes. And yet, no matter how much the deliverable was discussed, it was not coming together….slowly becoming a snowball. Continue reading →

Introduction

Everybody who has worked with Oracle Receivables has had to deal with customer statements. Customer statements show customer related transactions such as invoices, credit memos, payments, etc. Customer statements are printed with a predefined cycle. There is a special form which allows you to submit generation of a customer statement.

The form submits a standard process ARXSGP written in Pro-C.  This process gathers information about customer receivables activities for the reporting period throughout the Oracle eBusiness Suite, inserts the information into temporary tables and submits the report ARXSGPO to actually produce the output. The result of this operation is an ASCII file. Continue reading →

Quality of design documents is the perpetual issue which I had to face on every implementation I had ever had a chance to work on.

On my very first Oracle eBusiness Suite implementation project my manager asked me to paste everything, including source code at 6pt, into one big Word document to make sure nobody reads it. I am very thankful to my manager because I learned how not to write design documents and I read AIM Guidelines, both volumes. Question to the audience: who has ever seen these documents? Continue reading →

The other day I came across a web site www.javacamp.org which lists Java design patterns. Highly recommend to all software designers. Even if you do not do software design for Java, knowledge of design patterns is an invaluable resource of ideas for new applications you are building.

AIA stands for Application Integration Architecture. Architecture (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Architecture) is a fundamental underlying design of computer hardware, software, or both. In other words it is an integrated set of tools and concepts which help you build new solutions.

All major software vendors have their own AIA delivered via the Application Servers, JBoss from RedHat, WebSphere from IBM, Oracle 10g AS from Oracle, WebLogic from BEA, NetWeaver from SAP, WebMethods. If you look into each of the AIA from each of the vendor, you will not see much difference in terms of delivered functionality. Each architecture includes an HTTP Server, a servlet container, an Enterprise Service Bus, a BPEL Engine, etc. What does differentiate one AIA from another? PIPs!!! Continue reading →