What’s coming in PeopleTools 8.50 November 10, 2008
Posted by Tipster in PeopleTools.6 comments
After seeing some of the slides and blog posts that followed Oracle Open World ‘08 I thought I’d put together a recap of what improvements Oracle are including in their next release.
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Migrating Navigation Collections and Pagelets November 4, 2008
Posted by Tipster in PIA, PeopleTools.add a comment
Following on from yesterday’s post on creating and publishing a Navigation Collection, now you’ve created one you’ll want to migrate it around between environments. There are a few steps to this. (more…)
Save time with a Custom Navigation Collection and Pagelet November 3, 2008
Posted by Tipster in PIA, PeopleTools.5 comments
Frequently when I’m working I find that I’m visiting the same areas within the system regularly, so to make my life easier I’ll often create a Pagelet based on a custom Navigation Collection containing my often used components. This greatly reduces the number of clicks required for day-to-day work and could be really useful for end users.
NB: Nothing shown here requires the Enterprise Portal product.
An example can be seen here:
PeopleSoft Timings Records October 14, 2008
Posted by Tipster in PeopleSoft, PeopleTools.3 comments
Have you ever wanted to retrieve timing information for a process only to find out the the purge has removed all trace from Process Monitor? Or have you ever wanted more granular information about which parts of an App Engine took the longest? Or maybe you’re not troubleshooting an individual process but want to establish a baseline for long-term performance gathering on your batch window to identify potential future issues.
There is an easy way to accomplish all of the above as PeopleSoft can (although it doesn’t by default) write some really useful data on processes to database records, all ready to be queried.
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StackOverflow – excellent new Q&A site October 1, 2008
Posted by Tipster in PeopleTools.1 comment so far
Have you stumbled across Stack Overflow yet? It’s a great new website that fills a gap for the perfect place to post programming questions.
It is free, unlike Experts Exchange.
It isn’t rammed with adverts and link-spam, unlike PeopleSoftFans.
And it is a lot easier on the eye, more Web 2.0 and faster than IT Toolbox.
The site designers (including Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software fame and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror), are themselves well known and respected individuals in the art of programming and UI design, and it shows. It has lots of nice features, but I like being able to vote up answers and comments, so the better responses rise up the page.
It has only just come out of closed beta so there isn’t much on there for a niche like PeopleSoft yet, but once the answers start getting indexed by Google I imagine it’ll become the first stop for programming issues. If we can get enough people treating this as ‘the site’ for PeopleSoft Q&A then I think we’d all be winners.
If you ask a question, make sure you tag it with ‘PeopleSoft’ so it’s wasy to find.
A nice spot to Grant Johnson of Amadensor for asking the first question.
Skills shortage? September 22, 2008
Posted by Tipster in Oracle, PeopleSoft.2 comments
Frank Scavo has a post covering an article from CIO magazine discussing the Oracle and SAP skills shortage.
He muses over a comment on the article concerning whether the skills shortage is independant of experience, or whether it’s only the more experienced end of the spectrum that has a shortage.
My first reaction is to agree with this. From the consultants I know here in the UK there are those that seem to skip from project to project, only having gaps in between where it’s by their own volition. Pondering this further though, are these the best consultants or just those that are better organised or with better networks?
It’s difficult to tell the difference, because the most experienced consultants are likely to have a wider network of contacts, and will have changed projects many times so will be well versed in the traps novices may fall foul of.
So which is it? I’d like to think it was the former. A talented and experienced consultant will always get work. However I fear it’s the latter as I’ve come across a few that have succeeded by being barely adequate developers but expert schmoozers.
And is the comment on the article correct? Is there a surplus of inexperienced consultants around, but a dearth of their experienced colleagues?
What are your experiences?
A couple of pieces of Fusion news September 4, 2008
Posted by Tipster in Fusion, Oracle.4 comments
I’ve decided to keep this blog for PeopleSoft related items and start a second (surprisingly titled Fusion Tipster) for Fusion related or more forward looking items. I imagine I’ll still post more frequently on this blog, at least until Fusion is released.
There are two pieces of content that I’ve come across in the last few days:
Firstly, there’s a mention for Floyd Teter who has seen Fusion Apps in the flesh.
Secondly, it seems that Oracle’s “Mr Fusion” has left the company.
Creating an entirely read-only user in PeopleSoft August 28, 2008
Posted by Tipster in Oracle, PeopleSoft, PeopleTools, SQL, Security.4 comments
On big projects it is quite likely that large numbers of developers have access to a many environments. Occasionally they can have access to environment which is quite important, for instance one that the customer is using for training or testing.
To reduce the likelihood of developers accidentally deleting some data that they shouldn’t it would be quite normal to remove their access to the environment altogether. However if they need access for troubleshooting purposes then (at least on projects I’ve seen) it’s quite normal for developers to be told “OK, you can have access, but be careful not to do anything destructive”. Occasionally – as with everything – things can go wrong. Either someone forgets which environment they’re in, or does something with unintended consequences. An alternative to the “just be careful” approach would be to create an entirely read-only user profile (i.e. one that has display only privileges to every component system-wide).
A read-only user profile is shown in screenshot below, where no fields are editable and the save button is inactivated:
Also, on Run Control pages the ‘Run’ button is inactive. It’s going to be pretty difficult to alter data in this environment.
Here’s how to do it quickly and easily …
Substringing and Oracle SQL – Basic Trick August 18, 2008
Posted by Tipster in Oracle, SQL.1 comment so far
This may well be something that you already know, but it was totally new to me. It was one of those magic moments where you stumble across something so elementary you wonder:
a) how you haven’t found out about it before
b) how much time it’ll save in the future
This is related to taking only a portion of a string using Oracle SQL, and in particular the right hand side of a string. In other programming languages I’ve been spoilt with the RIGHT(x,num_chars) command, which we don’t have in Oracle.
In the past I’ve made do using something like:
SUBSTR(<character_field>,length(<character_field>)-4,4)
if I wanted to take the 4 right-most characters from a string. This gets cumbersome pretty quickly when you have multiple substrings etc.
Today – to my delight – I discovered that you can include negative numbers and Oracle will count back from the right hand side. So this will take the 4 right-most characters from a string:
SUBSTR(<character_field>,-4)
PeopleCode records: PSPCMNAME and PSPCMPROG August 11, 2008
Posted by Tipster in PeopleSoft, PeopleTools, SQL.2 comments
A widely known tip and a new (at least for me) discovery:
Widely known tip
Most techies who’ve looked under the covers will be aware of PSPCMPROG. It’s the underlying table where PeopleCode is storeed. This isn’t immediately useful however as the actual code itself is stored in the PROGTXT field in binary so it’s not easily accessible. This isn’t an insurmountable issue however as there are a couple of routines to decode the field (an SQR and a Java version, both by David L Price). I’ve not used either method personally, but a colleague has used the SQR version with great success.
For me, this field isn’t quite the most useful on PSPCMPROG. You may have noticed that if you update the PeopleCode on a record, the record properties aren’t updated to reflect the change – I guess because the record definition itself hasn’t changed (although strangely Component and Page PeopleCode do update the timestamp on the corresponding Component/Page definition – so there’s a bit of an inconsistency there). So how do you check when and by whom a piece of Record PeopleCode was last updated? If you check the LASTUPDDTTM and LASTUPDOPRID fields on the PSPCMPROG record via SQL then it’s all recorded there. This snippet of knowledge has saved me (or at least expedited troubleshooting by showing me the correct person to ask about the change) innumerable times.
Lesser known tip
I’ve not really had much reason to look at the PSPCMNAME record in the past, however a colleague and I checked it recently and discovered the RECNAME and REFNAME fields. Every time you create some PeopleCode your code is parsed and a line inserted into PSPCMNAME for every reference to a Tools object. I assume that this is the record searched when using ‘Find Definition References’ within App Designer. However, now we know the SQL table behind this we can therefore query this table to quickly find out objects affected by code in a specified project, for example.
Both the company I currently work for and my previous employer had utilities to export project details to file, printing out settings and details from Tools objects to speed-up the documentation process (and we know how much techies love documenting!). Now we can add to that utility any objects that are affected but which aren’t included in the project.
