Change Control for PeopleSoft Developers

If you are working in a large PeopleSoft development team and if you and your team members are working on same area or objects it is very obvious that you might have encountered scenarios where the changes of one developer overwrites the changes of other developer. It is a very frequent scenario and always results in finding root cause of missing changes and the re-writing the original changes. There is a sort of control provided by PeopleSoft to control this scenario to an extent. I’m not sure whether every organization is aware of this or if they are utilizing this feature. This post is primarily targeted for those who are not aware of this.

The mechanism provided by PeopleSoft to avoid overwriting of the changes is called Change Control in PeopleSoft. This needs to be setup by the PeopleSoft Administrator of your team.

To activate this feature, the admin needs to log in to the app designer and select the Administrator item available in the Tools menu.

Tools > Change Control > Administrator

Select the Use Change Control Locking to enable the change control for the development database. If you want to audit the changes made to each object in application designer, then you may have to enable the Use Change Control History option as well.

Once this option is enabled for your database, in order to work on any object in the application designer, developers has to lock the object definition first. Once an object definition is locked by a developer, no other developer will be able to modify/edit that particular object unless the first developer finishes his work and unlocks the same object. There by the locking will make sure that no other developer will be modifying the same object at the same time you are working on it. So once you save your changes, you can be sure that no other person will be overwriting your changes. Once you unlock the object definition and the second person locks it for editing, the second person will be getting a local cache of the object which contains the changes added by the first person (So no app designer cache issueJ).

There are two popular ways to lock an object definition in PeopleSoft. The first method is to add the object to the project and under the Development tab of the project sidebar, right click the object definition. You will get an option to lock the object. The Unlock option will be enabled once the object is locked and vice versa.

The second method is to open the object in application designer and check the tool bars menu, you will get an icon to lock the object, unlock the object and to see the change history (if enabled by the admin).

Click the first icon (locked) to lock the open object, second icon (Unlocked) to unlock the open object, third icon (comment) to add a comment to the change history and the fourth icon (code) to see the revision history of the open object.

Whenever you use change control for development, ensure that each developer has a unique id to log in to app designer. I believe most of the organizations have a unique id for developer, but there are cases where individual developers do not have a PeopleSoft id and every one in a team logs in using a common developer id. If you are using a common developer id, then the change control is of no use.

Once you a developer is done with the editing, make sure that you unlock the object so that the next person could start on working on the same object.