Changing Employee Number Generation from Manual to Automatic

In Oracle HR, once a Business Group has employee number generation set to manual, Oracle does not provide a
means of changing it to automatic.  Consider the following business requirements:

¤	Convert legacy system into Oracle HR via API's
¤	Keep current employee numbers unchanged
¤	Provide automatic employee numbering for all new employees

These business requirements would require completion of the following

¤	Establish Business Group with manual employee number generation
¤	Convert legacy HR data via API's
¤	Change employee number generation to automatic within Business Group

Since Oracle does not provide the ability to change from manual to automatic, a company's options are

¤	Continue with manual employee numbering after conversion
¤	Establish Business Group with automatic employee number generation prior to conversion, and allow API's to assign new "automatic" numbers to each employee

Neither of these options meets the company's business requirements.

The business requirements can be met by completing the following

¤	Establish Business Group with manual employee number generation
¤	Convert legacy HR data via API's
¤	Determine a starting number for automatic employee numbering that is greater than the largest numeric converted employee number
¤	Through SQL given below

UPDATE PER_NUMBER_GENERATION_CONTROLS
SET NEXT_VALUE = (The starting number from #3 above)
WHERE TYPE = 'EMP'
AND BUSINESS_GROUP_ID    = (The organization_id from hr_organization_units )


UPDATE HR_ORGANIZATION_INFORMATION
SET ORG_INFORMATION2 = 'A'
WHERE ORG_INFORMATION_CONTEXT = 'Business Group Information'
AND ORGAINZATION_ID = (Same as business_group_id from above SQL)

SERVICE INTERFACE

The service interface is a Java interface that is designed to support both web services and local Java APIs. The service interface provides consistent APIs and error handling behavior across the different application products. Included is support for the new Service Data Object standard to increase interoperability in a Service Oriented Architecture. Service data objects are used to represent business objects in a standardized manner.

SERVICE TESTER

The service tester user interface is used to create unit and integration tests. The tests are recorded in documents as structured XML data. For integration testing, each test file can contain multiple test suites, and each test suite can have multiple test cases. As part of periodic system tests, service tests can be played back from either JDeveloper or from the operating system command line. The service tester supports the following features: Field masking, so that variable data such as the current date does not cause a test failure Pipelining, where the output of one test is used as the input of a subsequent test An option to suppress the commit of test data.

“Swan” USER INTERFACE

The new “Swan” user interface (UI) greatly improves the look and feel of the Oracle E-Business Suite, significantly enhancing usability and productivity. The “Swan” UI brings together some of the best UI concepts from Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards applications. Oracle E-Business Suite will use only the “Swan” look and feel for Release 12.

PERSONALIZED SPEL BINDINGS

SPEL (simple expression) bindings can be used to substitute or override the base SPEL bindings for rendered, required, and read-only properties.

ORACLE JDEVELOPER 10g RELEASE 3 (10.1.3)

Release 12 leverages Oracle JDeveloper 10g Release 3 (10.1.3). This release of JDeveloper is a J2EE development environment with end-to-end support for modeling, developing, and debugging applications and Web services. Oracle JDeveloper 10g Release 3 (10.1.3) allows existing Oracle Application Framework applications and services to be extended, or entirely new applications and services to be built easily.

PERSONALIZATION ADMINISTRATION

Release 12 extends the existing command line personalization capabilities with HTML pages included in the Functional Administrator responsibility. This feature also allows you to replicate personalizations across database instances.

IMPROVED ABOUT PAGES

The About page has been extended to include the following: Last 10 patches applied on the instance Flexfield definitions on the page, and whether they use unsupported features specific to the Forms stack The ability to launch Admin Personalization from the About page.

ADMINISTRATOR PERSONALIZATION USABILITY ENHANCEMENTS

Usability enhancements to the Administrator Personalization UI include: Ability to bypass the Choose Context page when the current context is known. A minimal page hierarchy, eliminating the need for hidden layout containers. Personalization error messages include a link to launch the “About page,” where the associated personalizations can be reviewed and edited.

EXTERNAL CONTENT IN OA FRAMEWORK PAGES

Administrator Personalization now supports the inclusion of any URL in OA Framework pages.

SQL COMPONENT EXTENSIBILITY

View objects can now be modified by using SQL components to extend an existing object, rather than by replacing the view object definition. SQL component extensions are designed to persist across upgrades of the underlying object.

FLEXFIELD ENHANCEMENTS

Flexfield errors are handled more gracefully. Warnings are raised if an OA Framework flexfield uses incompatible features.