PeopleSoft Tipster » PeopleTools

PeopleSoft Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs)

Tipster — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:55:44 +0000

A week or so ago PeopleSoft released Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) to anyone with a My Oracle Support account. Although it has always been possible to source them, you had to go through your Account Manager or raise a ticket. Now (provided you have an account on My Oracle Support) you can download them (using note id 1051533.1).

So why are they useful? They are a visual representation of the schema of parts of the database, so they tell you – at a glance – how the tables relate to one another, which fields are within each table and what the keys are. If you have them to hand it can save you browsing record definitions in App Designer.

You install them by running the supplied Change Assistant job and then performing some manual additional steps from the included documentation. After a server bounce and cache clear there’ll be a new root menu ‘Data Models’. Providing your Environment Management infrastructure is up and running the install doesn’t take more than about 30 mins.

This should keep your Business Analysts/Functional Consultants happy. Now if only there was a PeopleTools ERD …

A new Blog worth reading

Tipster — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:58:53 +0000

For those of you outside the UK – or for those who haven’t worked with Global Payroll before – one of the UK’s preeminent GP experts is a lovely chap called John Eckersley, and he’s just started blogging.

Please make sure that you add his site to your feed-reader:

http://jreconsulting.blogspot.com/

John has a lot of good experience to share and an easy to read writing style.

A Custom Message on the Signon Page (Final Word)

Tipster — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:41:10 +0000

Some people have been having issues with the signon page messages and caching on more recent versions of Weblogic (after all I posted the original more than 2 years ago now). I thought I’d revisit it on an up-to-date environment and try to fix it.

These are the steps I took (Tools 8.50.04/Weblogic 10.3):

Follow steps 1-4 from part 4. These are:

1) Create a Message File

Create a file called MOTD.txt (or whatever you wish) and place it in the ‘\webserv\\applications\peoplesoft\PORTAL\’ folder. Then make sure you can access it using ‘http://:/MOTD.txt’ from your browser. Note this URL for later.

2) Edit Signin Page

Edit signin.html (under the above path, plus \WEB-INF\psftdocs\\)

3) Create Place-Holder Div

Look for the section near the bottom with the text ‘tracelink’ in. Add the line in red below:





 <%=traceLink%> 


 <%=error%> 


 <%=ps.discovery.error%>

This is a place-holder for our message. Giving the Div a name allows us to easily refer to it in JavaScript, and we are also applying a style at Div level to the text that we will insert.

4) Set the Script up to be called on Load

Alter the Body tag to read as follows (section to add in red – change the url to the one you used previously):

include('http://:/MOTD.txt'); <%=framebreak%>">

This is all on one line in the HTML.

5) Add the script

In the scripts section, add the following script (add all the lines, regardless of what colour I’ve made them):

For those that have implemented this previously, the red section has changed slightly. I’ve applied a style to the DIV to make the message more noticeable. I’ve done this here so that if there is no message the styling is not applied and the signon page appears as normal.

6) Amend the caching parameter

Edit your weblogic.xml file (found in ‘\webserv\peoplesoft\applications\peoplesoft\PORTAL.war\WEB-INF\’). Locate the Container Descriptor section and add the line in red:

-1 true 0

Bounce your PIA and your message should appear. I’ve tested this in both IE and Firefox and it works fine. You do not need to subsequently bounce the PIA to change the message of the day, however it may require you to reload your browser, depending upon your browser’s cache settings. If you use IE and it’s set to check with every page visit then just hitting the refresh button works.

PeopleSoft and Google Wave

Tipster — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:48:29 +0000

So is anyone in the PeopleSoft community doing anything exciting with Google Wave?

Being a bit of a tech magpie I’m attracted by anything shiney and new, and I’m looking forward to putting it through its paces.

I get that it’s great for using with family and friends, and for collaboration within a team at work. Has anyone had any inspirations for utilising it to help within the PeopleSoft sphere?

PS. I have some invites left if anyone is still waiting to join.

Combined SIG – 24th Nov 09

Tipster — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:04:51 +0000

I’m going to be presenting a session in the Technical Stream of the UKOUG Combined SIG taking place in Slough tomorrow. If you’re part of the UKOUG and not coming I encourage you to have another look.

There’s going to be some decent content there. All streams are starting with a keynote from Paco Aubrejuan – the VP of Development for the PeopleSoft product line – who’ll be running through some of the new features in the 9.1 Apps and Tools 8.50.

In the tech stream we have a strong focus on Tools 8.50, with further slots from Graham Smith (talking about Related Content, the Org Chart class and what’s new in Portal) and myself (taking on Connected Query, the Reporting Console and other non-UI enhancements).

Other presentations from David Kurtz (database level wizardry) and Steve Smith (building an ad-hoc Query Tool) round out the content and the day finishes with a Q&A with Paco.

The full agenda (including the HR and Financials streams) can be found here.

Stress/Performance Testing PeopleSoft

Tipster — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:42:54 +0000

A colleague from my company has just landed a role testing the performance of PeopleSoft at a client. The client wanted to use free software and settled on ‘The Grinder‘ by Philip Aston (who I believe works for Oracle). Other open-source online performance testing tools are Apache’s JMeter and OpenSTA.)

I was really interested as I’d not done anything similar before, and the use of Open Source software was also a plus as I’d only heard of LoadRunner in this domain before (anything that makes PeopleSoft cheaper for clients is a good thing).

After a bit of experimenting we discovered that The Grinder is an nifty piece of software. It uses a central console as the controller and one or more agents, one per machine. The agents run worker threads that execute scripts (written in the jython scripting language).

It also contains TCPProxy, which you can use to record scripts (saving you from writing the jython from scratch).

Setting up SSL was a little fiddlier, involving messing around with keystores etc, but was nothing too challenging.

There’s not much info on the Internet concerning using The Grinder with PeopleSoft (there isn’t much for OpenSTA either, and only Brent’s post for JMeter).

Anyone wanting to know more can either get in touch, or check out the following resources:

The Grinder website user guide.

The Grinder usergroup archives.

PIA Colour Schemes v2

Tipster — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:05:49 +0000

A few years ago I put together a set of five alternate colour schemes for the PeopleSoft PIA and made them available for free download. The intention was that clients could use a colour for each environment, for example, DEV could be Red, TST could be brown, UAT could be green, SIT could be purple etc.

Version 1 of the colour schemes had a surprising amount of downloads, and it’s quite gratifying to walk onto a customer site and see them in use. There were however, some flaws:

The PIA Header at the top was not altered (as it relied on graphics, not style sheet changes),
The small icons in the menu, the navigation collections and the pages themselves were still blue, and
I’d missed a couple of minor style classes

So, I’ve now finished Version 2 of the colour schemes which addresses each of the above issues.

Details and download here.

Release of PeopleTools 8.50

Tipster — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:55:17 +0000

It’s been a long, long time coming, but PeopleTools 8.50 has been released!

There were a couple of docs floating around that listed 18th Sept as the release date, but no official confirmation from Oracle, so I wasn’t 100% sure that it was coming. Further details here:

http://blogs.oracle.com/peopletools/2009/09/general_availability_ga_of_peopletools_850.html

Rather intriguingly not only is there this release (which is the biggest in the PeopleSoft world for a good year or so) but also a new release of the Oracle Database, and a hardware tie-in with Sun in the last few days. Why are these being released now, with OpenWorld so close? Is there something even bigger that is going to be unveiled during OpenWorld?

A Progress Bar within the REN Window

Tipster — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:00:48 +0000

A while ago I showed how to output to the REN Window using PeopleCode while running processes through the Process Scheduler. A post I’ve been meaning to write for a while was a practical use of this some colleagues and I made during a Data Migration.

Typically Data Migration programs can run for a while, and for this client (which had >100,000 employees to process) a fair bit of time was spent watching the screen wondering how long was left (or watching the row counts via SQL). We soon got fed up of this and wrote this very quick progress bar for the REN Window:

This migration routine was just for the employee personal data, but we used a similar trick for the other migration processes also.

We could go and get a coffee, or catch up on some other work and with a quick glance every now and again we could see how long remained.

The ‘progress bar’ was created using an HTML table with a single row, lots of columns (I can’t remember how many, it may have been 100, whatever looks right on screen anyway) and no border or padding to the table cells. Then change the background colour according to whether your cell is in the ‘done’ portion or the outstanding portion.

For this process the code was looping through a table inserting employees, so we updated the REN Window with every loop to move the figures on (although I believe a subsequent edit was required to update every 5th or 10th row as every row was unnecessary).

More PeopleTools 8.50

Tipster — Sun, 17 May 2009 21:48:26 +0000

Following OpenWorld ‘08 I posted about some of the new functionality coming in PeopleTools 8.50, including partial page refresh, modal lookup and prompt dialogues, redesigned menu pagelet etc.

Oracle have now made the RVP available so we get a better idea of what is included in the release.

I’ve picked out a few things that I hadn’t heard about previously:

Maximum number of rows to return on search pages

Search pages will now contain an option to limit the number of rows returned. The maximum is also configurable globally in PeopleTools Options.

64 bit only software

It seems from Tools 8.50 onwards that the hardware the components are installed upon will be 64-bit only. No more installing a sandpit environment on your 32-bit laptop … [EDIT 17th May: It seems that running a 64-bit VM on a 32-bit host is possible with VM Ware, but not Virtual PC. See comment below from Jim Marion.]

Parallel file deploy in CA

Finally! This should speed up file copies.

Decoupling of PS_Home

It seems that there’ll be a read-only PS_Home with all of the binaries etc, and a seperate read/write config_home for the environment specific config files.

Graphical routings of messages

Should help troubleshooting Service Operations

Interactive PeopleCode debugger

It appears that during a debug session you’ll be able to change variables on the fly. Pretty nice.

App Class method drilldown

Right-click and jump to the method, just like you can with PeopleCode functions.

New ‘Swan’ contemporary style sheet

A lick of paint for the UI ‘matching Oracle Corporate application standards’, whatevr they may be. I hope that doesn’t mean the ‘mustard and blue’ that Oracle e-Biz suite users had for years.

Looking forward to it, roll on September …