Steps to activate User Preferred Time Zone Support

From release 11.5.10 CU2, EBS introduced new feature called User Preferred Time Zone Support. Ie each user can specify their time zone preference, and the system will honor this preference for display and entry of date with time fields. Before 11.5.10 CU2, end users had to interact with the system in time zone set at database level.

To activate this feature following steps to be true or setup properly.

• Database should be Oracle RDBMS 9i or higher
• Environment variable ORA_TZFILE must be configured to use the time zone file timezlrg.dat rather than timezone.dat (Note: database needs to be restarted if this environment is changed).
• The database must be started in the standard corporate time zone
• Profile Server Timezone (SERVER_TIMEZONE_ID) must be set at the Site level, and must be set to the same standard corporate time zone as the database
• Profile Client Timezone (CLIENT_TIMEZONE_ID) must be set at the user level
• Profile Enable Timezone Conversions (ENABLE_TIMEZONE_CONVERSIONS) must be set to Yes at the Site level
• Profile Concurrent: Multiple Time Zones (CONC_MULTI_TZ) should be set to No at the Site level
• Environment variable FORMS60_APPSLIBS must be set in the Forms tier with APPS standards libraries like APPCORE FNDSQF APPDAYPK...

For more details, refer User Preferred Time Zone Support Documents and metalink notes 330075.1 & 340512.1.

XML Publisher Report: Few Tips

Here are few useful tips to design XML Publisher RTF Templates.

1. Printing Report Parameters
In report, we need to print Report Parameters and might need to use it multiple times. To declare the parameter, create new field at beginning of the report with help text <xsl:param name="<ParameterName>" xdofo:ctx="begin"/>. Create one more new field with help text <?$new_field?> to print wherever parameter needs to be printed.

For example, assume P_EMPLOYEE_NAME is one of the report parameter. To use that in RTF, create new filed named P_EMP_NAME with help text <xsl:param name="P_EMPLOYEE_NAME" xdofo:ctx="begin"/>. To print this parameter value create one more new field with name <?$P_EMP_NAME?> as help text.

2. Fit into single page
Oracle Report Layout has “Fit to Page” property. If we set this to “Yes” then if the page is not enough to fit the content then entire content will be printed in next page. This is known and wildly used property. Is this possible in RTF Template?

Yes. First identify contents that need to fit into a page. Insert a table with only one row and column. Keep the identified contents inside this table. Select Table Property. Navigate to “Row” tab. Uncheck “Allow Row to break across Pages’ check box if it is checked. This will make sure the contents won’t split across pages.

3. Font Support
You might have noticed some time Report Output won’t match with RFT Template Font. This is because PDF Engine will support only specific fonts. If you use fonts that are not supported by PDF Engine then engine will use it is default font. So try to use fonts that are PDF engine supports.

Some time we have to use specific fonts that PDF engine didn’t support. Best example is company name, logo etc. Mostly we use these in report headers. Simple workaround is copy the logo or name or any text that we want it in specific font. Convert into to image and use that image wherever we need. Of course it will affect the performance if we use too many images in a template.