PeopleSoft Page and Field Configurator

This is a new tool delivered by PeopleSoft available currently in FSCM and HCM products. This cool new tool allows you to eliminate customization of the delivered application pages for minor changes such as field label change or making a field invisible and so on.

Yes, you have read that right. J The Page and Field Configurator allows you to customize the PeopleSoft pages without having modify the delivered code or metadata and hence these changes won’t be flagged as a customization. This further benefits you in up taking any patch/features from the PeopleSoft PUM images as you would not have to go through the customization impact analysis/testing/retrofitting etc and it tremendously reduces your time and cost associated with these processes.

The way this feature works is via configurations. You can define the Page or Page Field custom changes as configurations in the PIA and the same will take effect immediately when you activate the configurations. The Page and Field Utility currently allows the following Page/ Page Field modifications:

• Changing Label of Page Fields
• Hiding Page Fields
• Graying out Page Fields
• Setting a field as a Required Field
• Setting default Values to fields
• Hiding/Un-hiding entire page in a component
• Making entire page in a component as display only

The utility also allows you to define multiple configurations for a component via criteria. i.e. for each criteria you define for the component you can associate a different custom changes. For example if the Status of a particular field is ‘Pending’ you may want to hide certain fields and when the status changes to ‘Active’ you may want to display those fields but grayed out. It also provides the capability to assign these configurations selectively for each user/role as you define based on the business needs.

To get more idea on the feature you can watch the below video published by Oracle.

The feature is released on HCM Image# 24 and FSCM Image# 25. To use this feature you would need a minimum People Tools version of 8.55.15.

People Tools 8.56 – New Capabilities

Oracle has released the latest version of the application development tool for the PeopleSoft applications – People Tools 8.56. The latest version offers many new features and capabilities aimed at enhanced user experience, search capabilities, developer productivity etc.

In this post I am listing some of the key features available with the People Tools version 8.56. Readers are advised to contact the Oracle Support or Oracle websites (some of which are listed below) to get more detailed and authentic information on all the new capabilities offered by the latest version.

Oracle Blog on People Tools 8.56

People Books

PeopleSoft Info Portal

Cumilative Feature Overview

Classic Plus Styling - I would say this is one of the best functionality you would get with the newer tools release. You would get to convert all your existing classic components to match the fluid pages styling within just about 5 minutes of time. So whenever a user navigates from fluid component to classic or vice versa, it will be a seamless process. One major thing you have to note here is that the style only matches the look and feel and does not come with the responsive or fluid UX features.

Fluid Enhancement – There are couple of enhancements to fluid functionality. The major one includes the support of dashboard configuration in small form factor design.

Elastic Search – This is another major enhancement that is coming up with People Tools 8.56. The search technology is now replaced with better tool, Elastic Search. There are lot many performance enhancements in the search technology. It also allows clustering of indexes.

Event Mapping – Event mapping was one of the great technology change introduced in People Tools release 8.55. With release of 8.56, it is enhanced to be more powerful with support to Page Level events, Field Change event etc. Also now the framework supports tagging multiple custom codes to same people code event. The framework also gives the flexibility to find definition references similar to the People Code definition search.

Oracle Documents Cloud support – This is another glad news for all who love cloud applications. The PeopleSoft attachments functionality now allows the users to load attachments or documents from Oracle Document Cloud Service.

Role and Permission List Alias – This is something you could consider if your organization has specific roles and have to customize the people code wherever the role name is hard coded. Now with Tools 8.56, you would be able to give alias to the delivered Roles and give it your name without having to go into app designer to customize where ever the role name is referenced. People tools will do the role name conversion automatically on the fly.

Sensitive Field Masking – Another feature is a new page field property which allows you to mask the content of the sensitive fields such as SSN, Password etc. The field value will be available for all other normal processing and this property enables the data being masked when displayed to the user.

BI Publisher enhancements – BI Publisher is enhanced to apply personalization of regional settings, IANA time zone and Unicode characters for external file names.

PUM – There are many enhancements to the PeopleSoft Update Manager which helps to pick and apply the correct bug fix or feature. There are many new analytics such as Enhancement by Image, Enhancement by Product etc to help you choose the right fix. It is now easy to take actions such as adding a fix to change Package etc from the analytics.

PTF – The PeopleSoft Test Framework (PTF) is updated to make you run the test based on the result set of a query execution which could boost the productivity of your QA team. The PTF now also support testing on Charts. PTF also introduces drag and drop actions for certain steps.

ADS – Application Data Sets (ADS) which is used migrate your system data from one environment to another, as well as for certain configuration such as Related Content etc is now enhanced with an Application Designer like compare option, making it easy for you to spot on the change.