Continuing with the review of Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook (Oracle Press) into Chapters 5 & 6. We start to be taken into a lot more detail on the different types of customisation. Chapters 5 & 6 looks at the page composer capabilities. Chapter 6, specifically focuses on CRM because of the differences it has, although the core principles are the same and chapter 5, tends to be look at it for everything else. For non CRM solutions the users get a limited Page Composer capability, and Administrators get a more powerful level of capabilities in the form of being able to control what information is hidden or presented. The fact that the book identifies the differences in behaviour between the likes of the  HCM and Financials etc is of serious credit to the authors as it requires a lot of effort to check and verify such differences.

The chapters although following the previous ones providing a breadth of coverage also now dive into some detailed step by step examples of customisation. The examples don’t cover every possible type of customisation, but a good example from each area for example adding details to a form and re-arrange form layout and labelling through to changing the navigation menus.  My only small criticism is that there is no clear statement about the start state (i.e. which components are deployed and their initial configuration, is there any prior data needing to be loaded etc). For me at least, I tend to look at the step by step guides as being comparable to the detail necessary to manually run test scenarios. That said, this shortcoming isn’t the end of the world and I’m sure with a standard deployment of the fusion apps to hand to experiment with you should be able follow achieve the points being demonstrated even if you have to err away from the precise actions described.

The CRM Fusion Application appears to have a lot more capability within the Composer approach to extensions with ability to develop scripts using Groovy and ADF Business Components. The definition of event triggers, simple workflows and user alerts via the likes of email.

I had hoped that the chapters would perhaps touch upon internationalisation and localisation (e.g. making labels language specific, currency presentation) but checking the Oracle documentation this is a development (JDeveloper) style activity – so I’m sure that the next chapters will address as they look at customisation from a JDeveloper perspective.

Over all a well written pair of chapters managing to walk that fine line of providing breadth of information whilst still going into enough detailed depth for you to understand what is involved in implementing these customisations.

See earlier chapter reviews at:

• Chapters 1 & 2
• Chapters 3 & 4