Sunday, June 28, 2009

User Login Language Defaulting

A blog after a long time...but had to write it and share it with all. Recently my client posted me with an interesting question: Is it possible to login into Oracle Apps with a default language (say German or Dutch or Thai) without having selecting the language on the Apps login page. In fact the default language selection option on the login page driven by the profile option (Local Login Mask and default mask of 32) will be disabled.



Can this be done without customizing the default 'AppsLocalLogin.jsp'? Is there some way of personalizing it for a user? The answer is 'Yes'. In fact the solution is way simpler than we had thought. Oracle Apps provides us with two standard profile options to personalize language defaulting with the help of the below two profile options:

1. Applications Override SSO Server Language (FND_OVERRIDE_SSO_LANG)


The profile option needs to be set to 'Override SSO Serve Language' at the user level to pick up the default application language set for the user using his/her preferences.
2. ICX: Language


The profile option needs to be set to an appropriate language installed on the application like 'German' or 'Dutch' etc for each user. The profile option is equivalent to setting the application default language that can be set using the 'Preferences SSWA' responsibility. (The client in our case does not want to give this responsibility to the users as they can change a lot of things like currency, time zone etc. causing issues further).
Both profile options when set at the user level will login the user each time in the Applications with the set default language only. The simplicity of the solution Vs the complexity involved in the customization is comparable.

I hope this information helps others having similar requirements.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Oracle PLM - An Experience

When it comes to implementing any Oracle modules for your client, you definitely look for information/help all over the web. When implementing Oracle PLM for my client, i had to go through a similar search and trust me nothing was readily usable or worthwhile. Nothing was helpful enough for me to understand and implement the module for my client. So i decided to pen down my learnings w.r.t this module for the benefit of others.Trust me you will not find them on any other blogs/whitepapers.

Details:
Oracle Apps Rel - 11.5.10 RUP6 with PLM Family Pack E, Rollup patch - E13

** Some basic understanding of the module is required to understand the below points **
  • The New Item Request (NIR) is only for Engineering Items and not for Production Items.
  • The New Item Request (NIR) can have only one line/item on it. You cannot put multiple items on the it.
  • The lifecycle process in Oracle PLM is pretty cumbersome. The promotion of phases for items has to be done at each of inv.orgs including the item master org. There is no automatic way of progressing the lifecycle for the item in all the inv.orgs. [We had to cut down the no. of phases from 5 to 2 because of this big limitation].
  • Operational attributes/Item Master attributes cannot be updated during item creation using the New Item Request (NIR) workflow. Only user-defined attributes (UDA) can be updated. [This is a serious gap/flaw in the product].
  • The so called Role based security does not apply to Operational attributes. [Another major flaw in the product]. A workaround that we used to fix this issue was to use function security and exclude the specific attribute groups from the specific custom responsibilities.
  • The HTML based change order although highlighted in the user/implementation guides as similar to the existing 'Engineering Change Orders' is NOT true. There is a lot of difference between the HTML & Forms flavor. The best part of all, the HTML screen eventually takes the user to forms only.
  • The HTML based change order does not give any warnings unlike its Forms counterpart when the same revised item is put on an another ECO. [I have an Oracle SR for this issue].
--Check out this space for more updates...

Monday, November 10, 2008

First Post

This is my first post to my first blog and i thank Blogger.com for making it so easy and simple for me.

!!! Go Blog !!!