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R12 – How to use Business Events in Oracle Workflow

Following is a simple step by step guide to use Business Events feature of Oracle Workflow in Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite).
Step 1) Navigate to the workflow administrator responsibility and choose the Business Events function. Define a Business Event.Owner name should be application name and owner tag should be the application short name.
Step 2) Define a Subscription for the Business Event defined in Step 1

  1.  System => should be the name of the database where the workflow is installed
  2. Phase => Keep the value for phase as 99 if you want the workflow to run immediately.
  3. Event Filter => Name of the event



Step 3) In workflow builder create a workflow item type and define 3 attributes as follows



Step 4) Create a event as follows



Step 5) Create a process as follows

Note: The starting node should be the Event that we have created



Associate the attributes that were created with the Event in the process.



Step 6) Test the event



Click “Raise in PLSQL”.


Now check if the workflow has been triggered in the Status Monitor

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Methods to Calculate Actual Cost in Oracle Apps

Following are actual cost calculation methods:

1. Period Weighted Average Cost (PWAC)

This is the strict average cost of the raw material during the period, based on the total estimated receipt (or invoiced) price for the entire inventory quantity. The period weighted average cost is a strict average cost for the period based on Period Total Quantity and Estimated or Final Prices.

PWAC is calculated by dividing — the sum of the transaction quantity multiplied by price — by the sum of transaction quantity, as shown in the following illustration:

the picture is described in the document text

Where:

Trans Qty – Receipt Quantities or AP interfaced quantities within the costing period

Price – Receipt estimated prices or AP invoice final prices within the costing period

2. Period Moving Average Cost (PMAC)

OPM calculates the average cost for the period while moving previous period’s cost with last period’s inventory balance and cost:

PMAC is calculated by dividing the result of — the quantity of the prior period inventory balance multiplied by the prior period cost, plus the sum of the transaction quantity multiplied by price — by the prior period inventory balance plus the sum of transaction quantity, as shown in the following illustration.

Where:

Prior Period Inv Balance – This is the prior period inventory balance captured from the inventory period ending balances.

Prior Period Cost – The prior period actual cost component from the cost component details table.

Trans Qty – Receipt Transaction Quantities or AP Interfaced Quantities within the costing period.

Price – Receipt estimated prices or AP invoice final prices within the costing period.

the picture is described in the document text

3. Perpetual Weighted Average Cost (PPAC)

The perpetual weighted average cost type computes the average cost for the entered receipts and quantities within the defined boundaries of the cost calendar. The calendar definition may in turn be identical to a fiscal year, or may span multiple fiscal years providing the flexibility of a variety of Perpetual Weighted Average cost methods.

PPAC is calculated by dividing — the sum of the transaction quantity multiplied by price — by the sum of transaction quantity, as shown in the following illustration:

the picture is described in the document text

Where:

Trans Qty – Receipt Quantities or AP interfaced quantities from the start of the costing calendar to the end of the current period.

Price – Receipt estimated prices or AP invoice final prices within the costing calendar.

Last Transaction Cost

There are two methods for determining last actual cost of a raw material:

LSTT – This method uses the last transaction within the costing period, regardless of whether the transaction is a receipt or an Accounts Payable invoice.

LSTI – This method uses the last Accounts Payable Invoice transaction within the costing period, even if there are latest receipts with estimated prices. In the absence of AP invoice transactions the latest receipt will be considered for the actual cost.

Last transaction cost adjustments will superseded any other transaction for the actual cost. For both methods, the adjustment unit cost is the actual cost.

Last Transaction (LSST) – OPM uses the last transaction in the costing period as the basis for the raw material cost (if there is no Accounts Payable invoiced cost for the period, the last receipt price is used to cost the raw material).

Last Invoice Transaction (LSTI) – OPM uses the last Accounts Payable invoice transaction in the costing period as the basis for the raw material cost, even if there are raw material receipt transactions that occur later in the period. If there are no Accounts Payable invoiced costs for the period, the last receipt price is then used to cost the raw material. Actual cost adjustments supersede any of the methods used to calculate actual cost – an adjusted cost is the actual cost.
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Re-Compile Invalid Schema Objects in Oracle Database

Operations such as upgrades, patches and DDL changes can invalidate schema objects. Provided these changes don’t cause compilation failures the objects will be revalidated by on-demand automatic recompilation, but this can take an unacceptable time to complete, especially where complex dependencies are present. For this reason it makes sense to recompile invalid objects in advance of user calls. It also allows you to identify if any changes have broken your code base. This article presents several methods for recompiling invalid schema objects.

Identifying Invalid Objects
The Manual Approach
Custom Script
DBMS_UTILITY.compile_schema
UTL_RECOMP
utlrp.sql and utlprp.sql
Identifying Invalid Objects

The DBA_OBJECTS view can be used to identify invalid objects using the following query.

COLUMN object_name FORMAT A30
SELECT owner,
       object_type,
       object_name,
       status
FROM   dba_objects
WHERE  status = ‘INVALID’
ORDER BY owner, object_type, object_name;
With this information you can decide which of the following recompilation methods is suitable for you.

The Manual Approach

For small numbers of objects you may decide that a manual recompilation is sufficient. The following example shows the compile syntax for several object types.

ALTER PACKAGE my_package COMPILE;
ALTER PACKAGE my_package COMPILE BODY;
ALTER PROCEDURE my_procedure COMPILE;
ALTER FUNCTION my_function COMPILE;
ALTER TRIGGER my_trigger COMPILE;
ALTER VIEW my_view COMPILE;
Notice that the package body is compiled in the same way as the package specification, with the addition of the word “BODY” at the end of the command.

An alternative approach is to use the DBMS_DDL package to perform the recompilations.

EXEC DBMS_DDL.alter_compile(‘PACKAGE’, ‘MY_SCHEMA’, ‘MY_PACKAGE’);
EXEC DBMS_DDL.alter_compile(‘PACKAGE BODY’, ‘MY_SCHEMA’, ‘MY_PACKAGE’);
EXEC DBMS_DDL.alter_compile(‘PROCEDURE’, ‘MY_SCHEMA’, ‘MY_PROCEDURE’);
EXEC DBMS_DDL.alter_compile(‘FUNCTION’, ‘MY_SCHEMA’, ‘MY_FUNCTION’);
EXEC DBMS_DDL.alter_compile(‘TRIGGER’, ‘MY_SCHEMA’, ‘MY_TRIGGER’);

This method is limited to PL/SQL objects, so it is not applicable for views.

Custom Script

In some situations you may have to compile many invalid objects in one go. One approach is to write a custom script to identify and compile the invalid objects. The following example identifies and recompiles invalid packages and package bodies.

SET SERVEROUTPUT ON SIZE 1000000
BEGIN
  FOR cur_rec IN (SELECT owner,
                         object_name,
                         object_type,
                         DECODE(object_type, ‘PACKAGE’, 1,
                                             ‘PACKAGE BODY’, 2, 2) AS recompile_order
                  FROM   dba_objects
                  WHERE  object_type IN (‘PACKAGE’, ‘PACKAGE BODY’)
                  AND    status != ‘VALID’
                  ORDER BY 4)
  LOOP
    BEGIN
      IF cur_rec.object_type = ‘PACKAGE’ THEN
        EXECUTE IMMEDIATE ‘ALTER ‘ || cur_rec.object_type ||
            ‘ “‘ || cur_rec.owner || ‘”.”‘ || cur_rec.object_name || ‘” COMPILE’;
      ElSE
        EXECUTE IMMEDIATE ‘ALTER PACKAGE “‘ || cur_rec.owner ||
            ‘”.”‘ || cur_rec.object_name || ‘” COMPILE BODY’;
      END IF;
    EXCEPTION
      WHEN OTHERS THEN
        DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line(cur_rec.object_type || ‘ : ‘ || cur_rec.owner ||
                             ‘ : ‘ || cur_rec.object_name);
    END;
  END LOOP;
END;
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This approach is fine if you have a specific task in mind, but be aware that you may end up compiling some objects multiple times depending on the order they are compiled in. It is probably a better idea to use one of the methods provided by Oracle since they take the code dependencies into account.

DBMS_UTILITY.compile_schema

The COMPILE_SCHEMA procedure in the DBMS_UTILITY package compiles all procedures, functions, packages, and triggers in the specified schema. The example below shows how it is called from SQL*Plus.

EXEC DBMS_UTILITY.compile_schema(schema => ‘SCOTT’);
UTL_RECOMP

The UTL_RECOMP package contains two procedures used to recompile invalid objects. As the names suggest, the RECOMP_SERIAL procedure recompiles all the invalid objects one at a time, while the RECOMP_PARALLEL procedure performs the same task in parallel using the specified number of threads. Their definitions are listed below.

 PROCEDURE RECOMP_SERIAL(
   schema   IN   VARCHAR2    DEFAULT NULL,
   flags    IN   PLS_INTEGER DEFAULT 0);

PROCEDURE RECOMP_PARALLEL(
   threads  IN   PLS_INTEGER DEFAULT NULL,
   schema   IN   VARCHAR2    DEFAULT NULL,
   flags    IN   PLS_INTEGER DEFAULT 0);

The usage notes for the parameters are listed below.
schema – The schema whose invalid objects are to be recompiled. If NULL all invalid objects in the database are recompiled.
threads – The number of threads used in a parallel operation. If NULL the value of the “job_queue_processes” parameter is used. Matching the number of available CPUs is generally a good starting point for this value.
flags – Used for internal diagnostics and testing only.

The following examples show how these procedures are used.
— Schema level.
EXEC UTL_RECOMP.recomp_serial(‘SCOTT’);
EXEC UTL_RECOMP.recomp_parallel(4, ‘SCOTT’);

— Database level.
EXEC UTL_RECOMP.recomp_serial();
EXEC UTL_RECOMP.recomp_parallel(4);

— Using job_queue_processes value.
EXEC UTL_RECOMP.recomp_parallel();
EXEC UTL_RECOMP.recomp_parallel(NULL, ‘SCOTT’);

There are a number of restrictions associated with the use of this package including:

Parallel execution is performed using the job queue. All existing jobs are marked as disabled until the operation is complete.
The package must be run from SQL*Plus as the SYS user, or another user with SYSDBA.
The package expects the STANDARD, DBMS_STANDARD, DBMS_JOB and DBMS_RANDOM to be present and valid.
Running DDL operations at the same time as this package may result in deadlocks.
utlrp.sql and utlprp.sql

The utlrp.sql and utlprp.sql scripts are provided by Oracle to recompile all invalid objects in the database. They are typically run after major database changes such as upgrades or patches. They are located in the $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin directory and provide a wrapper on the UTL_RECOMP package. The utlrp.sql script simply calls the utlprp.sql script with a command line parameter of “0”. The utlprp.sql accepts a single integer parameter that indicates the level of parallelism as follows.

0 – The level of parallelism is derived based on the CPU_COUNT parameter.
1 – The recompilation is run serially, one object at a time.
N – The recompilation is run in parallel with “N” number of threads.
Both scripts must be run as the SYS user, or another user with SYSDBA, to work correctly.

For more information see:
DBMS_UTILITY.compile_schema
UTL_RECOMP
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XSL/XPATH for BI Publisher

When you start developing RTF Templates and try to do something a bit advanced most likely you start seeing these words, XSL, XSLT, XPATH, XSL-FO…. And they might have scared or confused you. I’ve met many people use those terms without a correct understanding and everybody uses them in different ways so even I get sometimes confused when I talk with them. 😉 I think the part of the reason is coming from its own history.

What is XSL?

XSL stands for ‘Extensible Stylesheet Language’ and it was designed to describe how to transform and format XML files. But it split into different specifications (or languages) as listed below. So this XSL itself actually is really anything today, it rather be a family name if you will, which contains all the three related languages below.

Here is a list of the three languages that comprise the XSL.

  • XPATH – a language for navigating in XML documents
  • XSLT – a language for transforming XML documents
  • XSL-FO – a language for formatting XML documents


Let’s take at look at each language in more detail and why we need to know them for BI Publisher reports development.

Start from XPath…
XPath is a language for finding information in an XML document. XPath is used to navigate through elements and attributes in an XML document. XPath uses path expressions to navigate in XML documents. It is very similar to what we call ‘Path’ on Unix file system. Basically it acts as a navigation in XML files. Let’s say there is a parent node called ‘Department’ and it has a child node called ‘Employee’. Now you’re processing Employee node and want to get some data from the parent node, Department. This is where the XPath comes in. And it is in fact very simple to do this. You can type something like ‘../Department/BUDGET’. Yes, that’s it and it’s very similar to the path we use at the file system, right?

Path Expression
What makes XPath different from the path is its Path Expression. The Path Expression is very powerful and makes it much easier to access to any vaues in the XML files.
For example you can use ‘//’ (double slashes) to indicate that you want to get any Element and it doesn’t matter if what level the element is.

Here is a list of commonly used Path Expressions.

/ – Selects from the root node

Example:
/Department (Selects the root element Department)
Department/Employee (Selects all Employee elements that are children of Department)

// – Selects nodes in the document from the current node that match the selection no matter where they are

Example:
//Department (Selects all Department elements no matter where they are in the XML)

Department//Employee (Selects all Employee elements that are descendant of the Department element, no matter where they are under the Department element)

. – Selects the current node

.. – Selects the parent of the current node

@ – Selects attributes

Example:
//@type (Selects all attributes that are named type)

Predicates

Also, there are some advanced expressions called ‘Predicates’. Predicates are something you might have seen in your template They are presented with square brackets. They are used to find a specific node and can have specific conditions to specify the node. For example, ‘/Department[1]’ will return the first Department node while ‘/Department[2]’ will return the second Department node. You can also have a condition in the predicates to pick a certain set of nodes only when the condition matches. For example, if you specify ‘/Department[Salary>5000]’ then it will return only the Department nodes that contains Salary element whose values are greater than 5000.

You can also specify relative position. The above example of ‘/Department[1]’ will always return the first Department node in the XML file. But if you have many groups or you’re grouping by a certain value (e.g. Department name) and you might want to pick the first node in the each group. In this case you can use ‘Department[first()]’ or ‘Department[position()=1].

Operators (Functions)
Also, XPath has its own Operators (or functions) that you can use to process or calculate your data in the XML file. For example there is a ‘substring’ function, which you can use to get a part of the data you want from a specified Element values. There are many other useful functions and all of the standard XPath functions can be used in the BI Publisher’s RTF Template. Here is a set of XPATH functions that are useful and we use in many cases with the RTF Template.

List of XPATH functions

  1. substring()
  2. substring-before(’12/10′,’/’)
  3. replace(“Bella Italia”, “l”, “”)
  4. upper-case() /lower-case()
  5. contains()
  6. distinct-values()
  7. false()
  8. sum()


Why this is for BI Publisher?
Now you have gone though the XPath basic and wondering ‘why do I need to know this?’ Here is list of example use cases where we think it is critical and very useful if you understand the XPath appropriately.

  1. With for-each-group you need to specify a parent node and an element node where you want to group by with XPath appropriately
  2. When you want to access to a parent node’s element values when you are processing tis child node.
  3. For IF condition you might want to process data to build some valid conditions. For example if you want to get Employee name ‘Smith’ regardless whether it’s in upper case, lower case or the combination, you can use ‘upper-case()’ so that every type of ‘Smith’ will be matched.
  4. Inside Chart definition you need to specify all the Element names appropriately with XPath. Also you can use the XPath functions to have conditions or process data inside the Chart.


These are just a few examples to list, but there are many other cases you can take advantage of the XPath and make your RTF Template development much easier and more flexible and powerful.

Also, note that using the XPath without an appropriate understanding might cause performance and resource allocation problems. Due to its flexibility you can achieve what you want to do by using many different ways with XPath. However, you might end up typing XPath codes that cause very resource intensive or unnecessary processing. The key is to have a right understanding of XPath and write the code in the most optimized way from maintenance and performance perspective.

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Solved: Workflow Error When Clicking View Status Diagram on Status Monitor

When you want to view the status diagram of workflow process on status monitor page from the workflow administrator responsibility, maybe you get the error page like below:
The solution for the above issue is set the Server Timezone profile option on the Site level.
After that you can able to see the status diagram in workflow status monitor.
 
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