Tag Archives: Fusion Applications

Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook – Summary Review

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in Book Reviews, Books, General, Oracle, Oracle Press, Technology

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So having written a series of detailed blog entries reviewing a couple of chapters at at time I thought it might be worth just providing a very brief review. Writing a book that provides both breadth of coverage for a very large subject area as well as meaningful depth is a very difficult trick to pull off. But the authors of this book have succeeded magnificently. The book tackles the subject of basic customization that users can perform through to in-depth feature development using the Oracle SOA stack. Not to mention reporting and analytics. The book has been written in an engaging way providing context, background and Fusion Application principles and then taking examples of how to implement the different kinds of capabilities. From this book, you should have a good grasp of what to expect and how to approach Fusion application Extension work.

As a result I’d recommend this book to Architects, Project Manager’s who want to understand what their development team should be doing and the risks of their approach. This would also form a good roadmap into the detail for developers starting out in the Fusion applications space.

 

Detailed reviews can be seen at:

Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook Chapters 5 & 6

31 Monday Mar 2014

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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:

Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook Chapters 3 & 4

23 Sunday Mar 2014

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Continuing with the review of Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook (Oracle Press) I’m going to look at chapters 3 & 4. Chapter 3 looks at the different types of Flex Fields from the well known Dynamic Flexfields (DFF) and the more advanced EFFs and KFFs (different ways to provide more advanced flex values such as linking other tables of data).

The book describes briefly the steps to utilise many of the capabilities with some screenshots but don’t mistake this for a detailed key this value followed by click that button combined with screenshots of every step for all aspects (if you did that we’d probably trying to read 5000 pages not 500). So if you want to see and feel all the different aspects explained you will need to have an instance of Fusion apps to try the techniques out with. For me, this is no bad thing, I want to understand what the capabilities are and a sense of the effort and complexity involved – if I want to have blow by blow guide I’d turn to OTN and the tutorial video clips being made available everyday by Oracle on YouTube.

The book also recognises not all strategies are available with all Fusion apps and what can therefore be done. Either by implementing the capability yourself, or asking Oracle to prioritise feature development in the Fusion apps domain.

Unusually rather than continuing with customisation capabilities in Chapter 4 we look at Security. This is no bad thing as if you want to achieve security in depth you need to understand how it can be incorporated at every level as you go rather than as an after thought at the end. But as you go through this chapter you’ll see just how central the security framework is to working with Fusion Apps.

The security perspective comes primarily from an authentication and authorisation (A&A) perspective so bringing in OAM and OID along with related tooling (including APM which is a central tool for Fusion Apps Security). The A&A framework provides an advanced hierarchy of roles and permissions as the capability to integrate extensions with it. The book again provides a solid foundation on which you can build specific implementation understanding.  Security comes in two forms – functional (i.e. restricting access to Fusion app capabilities) and data (which records a user can or cant see). The fascinating aspect for me is the data view because the different organisational possibilities that can influence the data you can or can’t see – for example by value, by internal organisational structures such as departments, by suppliers/partners/customers and so on (Oracle use the terminology of sets).

Security considerations go beyond just managing major roles, but how to autoprovision users (i.e. I create an OID entry for a new employee – how to provide them with a standard set of credentials). How to interact with Fusion Apps at the web service level from inside or outside the secured FusionApps environment.

As with Chapter 3, there are illustrations on how to establish some security settings and leverage security for your own development, but not in an exhaustive click by click manner.

Both chapters, particularly Chapter 4 introduce the ideas and approaches in a succinct manner explaining both the more well known concepts but also the more advanced capabilities along with identifying some common challenges and how they can be overcome (through the provision of tooling or technique for diagnosis).

So far this has been the best introduction to Fusion Applications I have come across.