Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Archive for March, 2007
Project Success Factors – An introduction
Mar 30th
A few weeks ago I was asked to deliver a presentation on methods (development, project management, application implementation, …) to the Oracle User Group Holland (OGH). My initial response was a bit reluctant, as I generally associate Methods with a certain degree of boredom. I was given ample opportunity to give my spin to the subject, so I asked myself: why do methods exist?
Well: we think they contribute to project success, don’t we!
Project success is a subject that sounds a lot more interesting. Project success in actual real life projects and as a subject for discussion: which factors contribute significantly to this success. And methods should peep in along the road?
“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.” (Mark Twain). An excellent quote and one, I must admit, in which I recognize myself to some degree. I don’t know if it’s true, but…hold on…in Dutch we have a saying “Geluk is met de dommen”. Freely translated: Luck comes to the ignorant, so…there must be some truth in this statement. It almost seems like, if you don’t see the problems, they won’t see you, either!
It’s a bit thin to base your whole project on, that I admit.
In upcoming postings I will explore other factors, next to ignorance, that contribute to the success of projects, or work in general, or life, perhaps…
SOA Suite Build, Deployment and Test Automation – part 3: test automation
Mar 30th
This is the last in a series of three posts. The goal of these posts
is to outline an automated build procedure for Oracle’s SOA Order
Booking demo application and deploy it to an Oracle Application Server
that runs the SOA Suite. The first episode in this series covered the environment setup and automated BPEL builds. The second part dealt with automation of ESB deployments.
The final part covers BPEL Process Test Automation. In a consolidated document that also holds parts 1 and 2, it is published at Oracle’s Technology Network as part of the Oracle SOA Suite Best Practices series. Here is the direct link: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/soa/soa-suite-best-practices/auto-deploy.html. Hope you enjoy it.
“Form Personalization” in Oracle e-Business Suite Release 12 still doesn’t offer a workaround for suboptimal LOV-Queries
Mar 27th
In Oracle E-Business Suite release 11.5.10.2 some list of values (LOV) are not implemented considering the full functionality of the e-Business Suite. The " Project LOV’s" in Payables Invoices (f.e.) always shows all project tasks and expenditure types. Tasks and/or expenditure types, excluded for charges, are shown also. "Charge Allowed flags" and "Transaction Controls" in the Projects module aren’t taken into account in these LOV-queries.
Customers do not like this "feature" ! Being able to select tasks/expenditure types and "hearing afterwards (validation)" that tasks/expenditure types are not allowed for costing. Can we solve this LOV-problem using "Form Personalization (see note 279034.1 on Metalink)" … as long as the standard functionality isn’t implemented as it should be …?
The Form Personalization feature in Oracle e-Business Suite 11.5.10 allows you to 
Read the rest of this entry »
Exporting to Excel from any ADF Table
Mar 26th
No matter how fancy the application you develop, no matter how sophisticated the user interfaces: end users will always clamor for Excel. All data eventually will end up in some Excel Spreadsheet it seems. And grudgingly or not, we will of course oblige them. Depending on how difficult it actually is to achieve such Excel export functionality.
Well, frankly, using the Apache POI library and the ADF Model, it turns out to be very simple. In fact, it turns out to be very simple to create a generic Table To Excel Export facility, that we can apply to any Table (binding) in our application in a matter of mere minutes.
Note: the foundation for this solution was laid in Frank Nimphius’ Weblog article ADF Faces: Exporting table data to Excel from ADF Faces/ADF (http://www.orablogs.com/fnimphius/archives/001881.html ) which itself was based on work done by Jakub Pawlowski. We will see a refined version of their work, one that is not dependent on ADF BC as Business Service, that is generic for all Table Bindings and that allows the user control over which columns should be in the Excel Spreadsheet as well as which rows.
Read the rest of this entry »
Solving a Sudoku with Collections
Mar 26th
If you want to write a program to solve sudokus, you can use almost any programming language. And PL/SQL too!
Cognos 8 BI or Oracle BI EE (Siebel Analytics) – not a difficult choice
Mar 25th
Last week I was invited by Cognos Netherlands to an Infoseminar Cognos 8 BI.
I know that Cognos 8 has been in the market since 2005 but I have never had the opportunity to work with or tryout version 8. The last version that I worked with was 7.3 and therefore I was interested to see what had all been improved. As I have just started using the Oracle BI EE (Siebel Analytics) set of products, I also found it a good opportunity to compare the two products.
By the end of the presentation I was very pleased with what I had seen as I realized that Oracle’s BI EE set of products were superior. Read the rest of this entry »
About hierarchical queries, filling the gaps and doing stuff in ApEx
Mar 24th
Sometimes you are writing some codes and things really come together well.
Let’s imagine, you are writing a little tool in ApEx for registering hours on a project. The hours are recorded in a table which contains all days of the week and a week number (and employeenumber and projectnumber). One region on the page shows all weeks in the vicinity of the current date, including those which have no recorded hours and thus do not exist in the registered_hours table. Read the rest of this entry »
Using a generic JHeadstart Custom Template to support the inputTextHyperlink display type
Mar 22nd
Being able to generate our ADF Web Applications is a fine thing. JHeadstart can really get us a long way with our application. However, in most situations, JHeadstart will not get us all the way. It does not generate everything our end users have come up with. There are several strategies with this situation where the generator is not able to deliver exactly what was requested:
- Change the functional specifications to what the generator can generate
- Go in after the generator has run to make post generation manual changes (and devise a strategy for either not generating again or reapplying those manual changes again)
- Change the generator to make it generate what you want to have.
None of these seem particularly wonderful. However, with a smart combination of the second and third option, we pretty much can make everybody happy: Read the rest of this entry »
Oracle E-Business Suite R12 with OEM10G
Mar 20th
After configuring the Oracle EBS 11.5.10 environment in OEM10G, it was time to also configure the new Oracle EBS R12 environment in OEM10G.
Before I could configure R12 in OEM10G, I first had to upgrade the Oracle Applications plugin for EM10GR3. I downloaded the patches p5489352_R12_LINUX.zip and installed this patch on the OMS_HOME and in the local AGENT_HOME’s (11i and R12 agent). For R12 also patch p5843357_R12[1].OAM.A_R12_GENERIC.zip was installed…After applying the patch, my first 11.5.10 configuration didn’t work anymore, so I had to rediscover both R12 and 11i again. Read the rest of this entry »
EBS Release 12 “SWAN” User Interface
Mar 19th
Last week AMIS organized an " E-Business Suite Release 12 (EBS R12) New Features" session.
It became obviously that EBS R12 has many new features and the improved user interface is only one of them. Nevertheless, the new "Swan" user interface is for most end users an important one and end users are curious to experience this UI.
Besides this user experience it’s also nice to know where a term as "Swan" user interface comes from. Read the rest of this entry »
