Oracle Designer – a tip for Generation of Forms – Enforce Post Generation

During our session on the Future of Oracle Designer yesterday I had a conversation with Josef Megens of Oracle Consulting and told me of a trick conceived by Mark Vahsen (formerly of Oracle) to ensure that post-generation changes could not be overlooked after generating a form.

The trick is this: include a program unit called POST_GENERATION_CHANGES in each form – or rather in each Module Definition in Designer – that requires post-generation changes. Make sure that this program unit contains a description of all post-generation changes. Also make sure that it does not compile! This means that when a developer generates the form and forgets to apply post-generation changes, compilation of the form will fail with an error message saying something like ‘Compilation of POST_GENERATION_CHANGES failed’. This should be a clear indication to the developer that he or she should apply the post generation changes.