Oracle Ace Award February 23, 2010
Posted by Tipster in Oracle.9 comments
I’ve started off this morning feeling ACE! The reason for this great start to the day is that I’ve recently discovered that I’ve been named an Oracle ACE! I am very excited and honored to be added to the Oracle ACE community and I’m looking forward to continuing to contribute in the years ahead.
Scaning through the list there are only 258 ACEs worldwide across all specialisms (this includes ACEs for Database Management, Java, Linux etc as well as Applications). The list of all the ACEs and their profiles can be found here.
PeopleSoft Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) February 10, 2010
Posted by Tipster in PeopleTools.6 comments
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.
A new Blog worth reading February 10, 2010
Posted by Tipster in PeopleTools.add a comment
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.
Hide the ‘Windows 7 is not supported’ message January 27, 2010
Posted by Tipster in PeopleTools 8.50, PIA, Windows.19 comments
If you’ve been using the latest version of PeopleTools with any version of Windows 7 (which is becoming more prevalent) then you’ll have seen this error message many times:
Now I’m all for being warned if I’m doing something unsupported and I know Windows 7 isn’t supported yet, but probably will be in the near future. I’m not going to swap my client OS just to keep the PIA happy, but I don’t want to be warned every single time. Also, it’s not a very well formatted error message as it throws out the alignment of the logon screen and it just looks a little messy.
I wasn’t going to do anything about my niggly annoyance until someone else wondered how to remove it then it piqued my curiosity.
As far as I could see there are two ways to fix this, find a way of adding Windows 7 to the supported OSes, or hide the warning message.
I tried many variations of OS codes in the browser.xml file as that appears to be where the supported OSes are read from (the sharper eyed among you may have noticed that I’ve added Windows 7 to the list in the above screenshot). This had no effect however, so I admitted defeat in trying to fix the cause and resigned myself to just trying to hide the symptom.
The HTML behind the signon page is ‘signin.html’ within ‘<PIA_HOME>\webserv\<domain>\applications\<site>\PORTAL.war\WEB-INF\psftdocs\<node>’. We can’t just comment out the error sections as we only want to hide this specific error message, other errors like ‘invalid password’ we still want to see.
The first step is to hide the browser error message. Search for ‘id=”browsercheck_error”‘ and you’ll see this section. Comment out as shown.
<div style="text-align:center">
<h1 id="error_img" style="display:none"><a id ="error_link" href="javascript:setFocus();" tabindex="1"><img src="<%=psCtxPath%><%=psHome%>/images/PT_LOGIN_ERROR.gif" alt="<%=130%>" border="0"/></a></h1>
<h2 id="login_error"> <%=error%> </h2>
<h2 id="discovery_error"> <%=ps.discovery.error%> </h2>
<!--<h2 id="browsercheck_error" style="text-align:left"> <%=browserCheck%> </h2>-->
</div>
This prevents the text from showing, however we also want to prevent the warning image being displayed for this warning also.
Search for ‘setErrorImg’ and you’ll see this function. Comment as shown and add the line below.
function setErrorImg()
{
var login_error = document.getElementById('login_error').innerHTML;
var discovery_error = document.getElementById('discovery_error').innerHTML;
/*var browsercheck_error = document.getElementById('browsercheck_error').innerHTML;*/
var browsercheck_error = "";
login_error = login_error.replace(/^\s+/,""); // delete leading spaces
discovery_error = discovery_error.replace(/^\s+/,"");
browsercheck_error = browsercheck_error.replace(/^\s+/,"");
if (login_error.length != 0 || discovery_error.length != 0 || browsercheck_error.length != 0)
{
document.getElementById('error_img').style.display = 'block';
document.getElementById('error_link').focus();
}
else
setFocus();
}
Bounce your PIA and now the message won’t be displayed when you use Windows 7, however other error messages will still appear as desired.
Note: Updated 27th Jan after Jim Marion’s suggestion below on my incorrect commenting syntax.
Restyling/rebranding HR9.1/Tools 8.50 January 12, 2010
Posted by Tipster in Look and Feel, PeopleTools 8.50.8 comments
I’ve spent a couple of days doing a rebranding job on one of our v9.1/Tools 8.50 environments and it’s a lot harder than it used to be pre-8.50.
Previously, if you had a rough idea of how it all fits together and knew the colour scheme that you were moving to you could do it in a day or two. Now however, I think it’ll take a bit longer. Here’s why: (more…)
A Custom Message on the Signon Page (Final Word) January 4, 2010
Posted by Tipster in PeopleTools.3 comments
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):
PeopleSoft and Google Wave November 25, 2009
Posted by Tipster in PeopleTools.3 comments
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 November 23, 2009
Posted by Tipster in PeopleTools.add a comment
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 November 12, 2009
Posted by Tipster in PeopleTools.2 comments
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:
Installed 8.50 but still have the old look? November 5, 2009
Posted by Tipster in PeopleTools 8.50.2 comments
If you install PeopleTools 8.50 with an ‘old’ application (i.e. one that is prior to v9.1) then the UI you’ll see still looks very much like the one we’re used to. What’s happened to all of the new 8.50 ajax-y goodness?
Yes, this is Tools 8.50!
These are the changes you need to make:
Main Menu->PeopleTools->Utilities->Administration->PeopleTools Options:
Style Sheet Name: PSSTYLEDEF_SWAN
Main Menu->PeopleTools->Portal->General Settings:
Navigation Type: Drop-Down
PeopleTools->Portal->Portal Utilities->System Options:
Style Sheet Name: PTSTYLEDEF_SWAN
That’s better!
Thanks to Bauke Gehem for commenting on Nicolas Gasparotto’s blog with the above advice.
When you install a fresh 9.1 environment this is set by default.
