Personalization, Extension, Customization in OAF

While dealing with Oracle EBS html based pages, we can modify or create completely new page using any of the below methods:

Personalization

Personalization is the process of making changes to the User Interface (UI) from within an Oracle E-Business Suite Page. Using 'Personalize Page' link or from 'Functional Administrator' responsibility, we can perform personalization. 'Personalize Page' link shows all the regions and items used in the page in hierarchical form for example as shown below:

From here, we can modify/personalize almost any items/region using 'Personalize' icon. We can modify properties such as Prompt, Rendering of item, making fields Required and others as shown below:

All the personalizations get stored in MDS (i.e. JDR_% tables) by creating a new document ID for the page. Thus any patch will modify the original document ID (standard one) and unlike forms these personalizations will not get removed.

Extension

There are not many things we can do using personalization such as changing the logic or control settings of the page. For these modifications we use extension. It is the process of making changes to the programmatic elements of an E-Business Suite form/page. It is possible to extend OA Framework-based pages either using controller extension or AM extension or by performing VO substitutions.

Customization

Customization is the process of creating new OAF pages. While Oracle does provide tools to do this (i.e., JDeveloper 10g with OA Extension), this is the only and least supported option.