Oracle Enterprise Scheduler

Oracle Enterprise Scheduler (ESS) is an application plugged into Fusion Applications to define, schedule and run different types of jobs and do advance scheduling. This functions similar to Concurrent Manager/Program in EBS, but with lot more new functionalities and of course with more user friendly navigations.

Oracle Enterprise Scheduler lets you to

• Run various jobs, supports PL/SQL, Java and other binary processes
• Distribute job request processing across a grid of application servers
• Group job requests into job sets, like request set in EBS
• Schedule & Automate job requests based on recurrence expressions
• Support sophisticated scheduling and workload management
• Schedule a future time for a step in a business flow for business process management
• Also to extend the standard application to manage job request submissions

Refer Fusion Applications Developer's Guide for Oracle Enterprise Scheduler document to learn more about this.

Extensible Flexfield (EFF)

Extensible Flexfield (EFF) is a new feature added in Fusion Application with existing Descriptive & Key Flexfields. It is similar to descriptive flexfield, but with the ability to add as many context-sensitive segments (attributes) to a flexfield as they need.

Some of the key benefits using Extensible Flexfields are

1. Number of configurable segments are not fixed unlike fixed number of segments in DFF
2. Attributes can be grouped into one or more attribute groups (ie contexts) rather than only one in DFF
3. EFF supports one-to-many relationships between the row and the extended attribute rows
4. Improved access controls than using DFF. It is possible to control the view and edit the attributes based on the context configurations.

To know more about this, refer Fusion Application Developer’s Guide & Extensibility Guide.

How BPEL OA Adapter connect to Oracle EBS?

In this article, I listed the steps to setup the connection factory for OA Adapter to connect to EBS. There are two major portions in this setup.

1. JDBC Resource Setups
2. AppsAdapter (ie OA Adapter) Connection Factory Setups

JDBC setups need to be completed first…

1. Get Database TNS Entry and APPS schema password
2. Login as Application Server Enterprise Manager (eg: oc4jadmin) and click oc4j_soa (default OC4J Instance)
3. Go to Administrator tab and click JDBC Resources Go to Task icon
4. Create new Connection Pool by giving name and URL. Follow the URL syntax carefully
5. Enter Credential user as APPS and its password and then test the connection
6. If test connection is success then create Data Source.
7. Select Data Source Type as Managed Data Source. Enter data source name and JNDI location. JNDI Location can be start with jdbc/NAME to maintain the consistency.
8. Note down the JNDI Name, it will be used while defining Connection Factory.
9. Select the above created Connection Pool and test the connection.

Now we can to use this JDBC Resource in OA Adapter Connection Factory Setups.

1. Go to Applications tab in oc4j_soa OC4J Instance
2. Select view as Modules (Default is Applications)
3. Select AppsAdapter Module and go to Connection Factories tab
4. Create new Connection Factory. Give meaningful JNDI Location. It can start with eis/Apps/NAME. For example eis/Apps/EBS.
5. Enter xADataSourceName as JDBC JNDI Name just created.

Now OA Adapter can be used in BPEL Process. Make sure same JNDI Name is entered when Partner Link is created for OA Adapter in JDeveloper.

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.