The PeopleSoft Tipster Blog

Collaborate 08 Presentations May 19, 2008

All,

many of the presentations from Collaborate 08 are now online (the library has been up for a while, but the number of presentations available wasn’t high to start with – it’s much more complete now).

It looks like theres some great content on there. Lots on existing PeopleTooks technologies, and some of the newer stuff too (XMLP, SOA, BPEL),  plus some good lower level techie sessions.

I’m a sucker for this kind of thing so I’ve downloaded 45 presentations for going through to pick up little gems of knowledge (heaven knows when!).

They can be found here:

http://www.questdirect.org/QuestDirect/Events/COLLABORATE/Browse+Education+Sessions.htm

Filter on PeopleSoft to shorten the list.

Workday wins large clients May 19, 2008

It seems Workday is doing pretty well.  They’ve just won two ‘mega-clients’, one whilst competing against Oracle and SAP.

Also, Salesforce.com is going live on Workday’s HCM offering.

Interesting …

More detail from here.

Dynamics growth slows? March 15, 2008

There’s an interesting post over on The Enterprise Spectator (a good blog to add to your feed-reader if it’s not there already) about how Microsoft Dynamics is fairing.  Not good is the answer, which may explain the recent-ish management changes.

One or two consultancies here in the UK have been starting Dynamics practises.  I’d be interested to hear whether their experiences match the articles findings.

Inserting XMLP File Definitions into Projects March 12, 2008

There have been a couple of occasions where the file definition (the template file behind the XMLP Report Definition) has become out of sync with what is in the project.

This may be because the file was inserted into the Project, and then a subsequent change made to the template and uploaded into PeopleSoft. In this case, the updated Report Definition and Template Definition would be migrated, but the new file wouldn’t be in the project so it wouldn’t be taken across. Unfortunately this leads to a really rather nasty message in the PIA.

The solution is clearly to re-add the File Definition in to he project, but it’s not always straightforward. You can select it as a related definition when you insert the template, but sometimes this inserts the old (overwritten file). To be sure you have the file inserted, you have to add it manually. The only issue is the insert file definition dialogue box is not helpful.

The search field only allows you to search on the long alphanumeric string, not the actual filename so you end up scrolling through the full list attempting to spot the file you’re after. As more reports get developed, the list will get longer.

The alternative is to use some SQL:

SELECT FILEID
  FROM PSFILEDEFN
 WHERE USERFILENAME = '<filename>'

This gives you the File ID, which is what the dialogue box searches on, enabling you to find your template file a lot quicker.

The REN Server – an Overview and a Neat Trick – Part 2 of 2 February 13, 2008

This is part 2 of 2. See the companion post here.

The Trick

The neatest trick I’ve heard relating to the REN Server came from Chris Heller and Larry Grey who were over for the UKOUG last year. They drew my attention to the ‘NotifyToWindow’ method of the PrcsApi class. It’s one of those little gems that’s tucked away in PeopleBooks that I’d never noticed before.

It’s a method that lets you inject HTML into the REN Server window and it sounded like an ideal method of giving users feedback on the progress of their process/report. To give it a quick try I added some code to the PORTAL_CSS App Engine (in a play environment obviously, not anywhere important) and gave it a whirl.

The code I added all went into PORTAL_CSS.CREFPERM.Step1 and was as follows:

At the top:
import PT_PRCS:API:*;

After the functions (about half way down):
Local PT_PRCS:API:PrcsApi &api = create PT_PRCS:API:PrcsApi();

Then, wherever I wanted to update the user of the status, I added the following:
&strl_WindowMsg = &strl_WindowMsg | "<br />Step 1/5: Portal Security Sync starting. (" | DateTimeToLocalizedString(%Datetime, "HH:mm:ss") | ")";
&nret = &api.notifyToWindow(AEPORTALCSS_AET.PROCESS_INSTANCE, &strl_WindowMsg);

I placed my messages at reasonable points in the process and ran it. The resulting REN Window looked as follows:

I’ve only output static text to the window, but there are further possibilities. Chris mentioned that in the past he has inserted the last few lines of the log file. I’d be interested to hear from anyone with good ideas on how to use this.

The REN Server – an Overview and a Neat Trick – Part 1 of 2 February 13, 2008

This is part 1 of 2. See the companion post here.

The Overview

The REN Server is a seperate Web Server designed to publish Real-time Event Notifications to users, saving them the effort of repeatedly clicking on the Refresh button in Process Monitor. The Popup window you see when running a process ‘to window’ is originally an HTML area populated/called from an iScript, but then some HTML/JavaScript is loaded from the REN Server itself.

To assign permission to run a report ‘to window’ there are 2 steps to follow:

1) Look on the PeopleTools tab of the Permission List and click on Realtime Event Notification Permissions and check ‘Reporting Window’ has ‘Full Access’.

If you wish to use SQL, this will show which Permission List is giving you access to the Report to Window functionality. By default, it is PTPT1200.

SELECT RU.ROLEUSER
     , RU.ROLENAME
     , RC.CLASSID
     , AI.AUTHORIZEDACTIONS
  FROM PSROLECLASS RC
     , PSROLEUSER RU
     , PSAUTHITEM AI
 WHERE RC.ROLENAME = RU.ROLENAME
   AND RU.ROLEUSER = 'PTDMO'
   AND AI.CLASSID = RC.CLASSID
   AND AI.BARNAME = 'REPORTING'

2) You’ll also need access to the iScript. Stay with the Permission List, and look on the Web Libraries tab. You need to give WEBLIB_RPT Full Access to the iScript.

Again, if you wish to use SQL, this will show you the Permission list that is giving you access:

SELECT RU.ROLEUSER
     , RU.ROLENAME
     , RC.CLASSID
     , AI.AUTHORIZEDACTIONS
  FROM PSROLECLASS RC
     , PSROLEUSER RU
     , PSAUTHITEM AI
 WHERE RC.ROLENAME = RU.ROLENAME
   AND RU.ROLEUSER = 'PTDMO'
   AND AI.CLASSID = RC.CLASSID
   AND AI.MENUNAME = 'WEBLIB_RPT'
   AND AI.BARNAME = 'ISCRIPT1'
   AND AI.PNLITEMNAME = 'IScript_GetReport'

Now that security is covered you might think that there’s not a huge amount to talk about with the REN Server as in some ways it’s a bit of a ‘black box’. Unless you need Clustering/Failover or a Reverse Proxy Server there isn’t much to configure.

• There are some settings in the psappsrv.cfg (logging levels, ports and authentication token domain),
• and some settings under PeopleTools in the PIA (client authentication, SSL and host machine),
• and of course the option to boot the PSRENSRV process or not is set using PSAdmin
• there is also a psrenconfig.txt under the App Server directory, but I’ve never needed to mess with these settings

Yes, yes, you say. I know all that already. Tell me something I don’t know. Ok, I’ll wager you didn’t know this …