And here is this time of the year again – Oracle OpenWorld 2011. I will attending the conference as a blogger – thanks to folks at Oracle. I hope to learn new things, meet new people – my readers, fellow bloggers and Oracle professionals. Let me know if you are attending:
As I was working on the Peoplesoft upgrade project I have noticed that some of the developers were still using App. Designer Compare reports as a sole means to comparing the code and components during customization reapplication process. It seems the new ways of doing compares are not being used as extensively as I hoped.
I figured I would write a quick post to remind my developers and others out there some of the features that have been implemented since version 8.49. For those experts readers who have been using these and other technics for awhile I would appreciate if you share your own technics.
Running Compares
So without further due, below you can see a sample PeopleSoft’s visual merge compare for Project Peoplecode. In order to save you from long and boring explanations – I will leave it to PeopleBooks – Using Merge Interface. However I would like to add just a few comments – sometimes I find myself pasting compare code into good old Notepad++ and running a compare in there. I guess I do like the power of the full fledged editor and syntax highlighting does not hurt as well.
As much fun as App Designer reports are I always like to look at the reports in the HTML view – better , faster and cleaner experience. And all it take is specifying Generate HTML report in the Compare Options in App Designer:
Secondary Pages
If you are creating a complex page that contains some sort of look-up pages – always a good idea to split the interface and not create page that would overwhelm the user. In earlier versions of tools going to secondary pages required user to transfer to a separate page, however since Tools 8.50 – secondary and modal pages can open in a modal JavaScript Popup that still allows you to stay on the same page:
In order to enable this behavior for existing and new pages you just need to enable one little checkbox and voila:
Change Control
When working in a team and making multiple changes to the environment you don’t want to be stepping on each others toes. Although still quite limited and inferior to Tools like Quest Stat – PeopleTools built in change control does provide you the ability to lock objects while you change them and leave comments as to what was done (always a good idea). This also helps with documentation – once you are done with the changes you can run a quick SQL and get a report of all the changes that were done for more please go to here.
I hope you enjoy this and let me know if you have any suggestions.
Recently we have encountered an issue where Office 2007 attachments. The upload worked just fine, but when someone would try to access the attachments in IE (very ironic) it would download as a zip (archive) file format. Microsoft started using OpenXML for all of the Office 2007 documents – essentially an archive that contains several xml files.
We guessed that problem was related to the MIME types not being recognized and after doing a quick search on Oracle Metalink we discovered this document
Problem : E-PC: Unable to view a Files of Office 2007 including DOCX file after upload
Part of this solution is updating the PIA web.xml with new MIME types supplied by Microsoft . But after doing so and restarting our WebSphere we still had a problem …
We tried and again in different environments and after awhile …
… still nothing.
After doing more online searching, elsewhere I encountered a post referencing having to add MIME types directly through WebSphere Admin console. And here are the rest of the instructions:
Hope this helps – let me know of you have any questions
I thought that it would be worthwhile to mention that Oracle has become more than ever aggressive towards partners and competitors alike. I would like to call this Oracle De-Support Strategy. Please keep the following notes in mind:
On the same note I would like to add that the theme of the conference was – Oracle Investment in Oracle Products on Oracle OS running on Oracle Hardware.
As long as you buy Oracle branded suite – you are all set, but be careful if you decide to buy just a jacket – you may need to go to the tailor to make it fit better. Not to be too negative though, Larry needed to make a decision and spend wisely, based on the recent acquisition of Sun and MySQL – Oracle has become a one stop shop that makes everything from the jackets, pants, shoes and soon will be making eye-wear and handbags to match.
PeopleTools & Application Releases
Oracle will try to release once a year Tools updates called – “Feature Packs”. I would like to talk in more detail about this because it affects upgrade strategy and resource planning.
Oracle recommends upgrading Tools on an annual basis to keep in sync with releases. Some people who usually upgrade to get significant features or to resolve problems, would find this annoying and resource consuming. For those folks there is Alternate Strategy – Skip One:
Oracle will make major application releases approximately every 3 years.
For better of for worse – the above allows to do better planning of the resources on IT and business side. I just hope Oracle will actually keep this schedule.
Please see the screenshots from the relevant Oracle presentation slides below:
PeopleSoft Patch Support
Peopletools Alternate Upgrade Strategy - Skip One
Oracle PeopleTools Blog
Oracle PeopleTools Blog
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