Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Forms Personalization & Custom PLL

Forms Personalization & Custom PLL

1. CUSTOM.pll is a single file/entity, hence only one developer can make changes to CUSTOM.pll at any given point in time.
You may also read best practices in CUSTOM.pll
2. If for some reasons CUSTOM.pll causes issues in Production, you will have to re-release the code changes after another round of UAT.
Form Personalizations makes this much simpler by allowing you to disable specific personalizations.
3. You do not need to resort to programming for trivial tasks like changing prompt, and more so for changing prompts in Muli-Lang environment

Important: Oracle will keep on improving capabilities in Forms Personalizations.
Hence some of these limitations that we see now in Forms Personalization might disappear over a period of time.

Note-1
Once a menu has been enabled using Forms Personalization, it then can not be conditionally disabled. However the proposed workaround over this issue is to display a message when MENU is clicked in the scenario’s it was meant to be disabled.

Note-2
Lets say you want to change the window title for all the screens within a responsibility. In this case, in CUSTOM.pll you could do so by a pseudo code similar to below
If fnd_global.responsibility like ‘XX%CASH%’ THEN
Set window title ( ‘Note: All transactions are audited’);
End if
As you can see, this can be achieved quite easily in CUSTOM.pll and the changes will be visible across multiple screens in the context.
However, for Forms Personalization, you will have to go and personalize each and every screen for which you want this change to be effective.


Note-3
The proposed workaround is to display the message that is returned as a result from SQL Statement.

Question: Should we migrate code from CUSTOM.pll into Forms Personalization?
Not really, there is no value in doing so, given that CUSTOM.pll is still supported and will remain so within the realms of Apps Unlimited.


Where is the metadata for Forms Personalization stored?
These personalizations are stored in FND tables

What is called first? Forms Personalization or CUSTOM.pll
First your form personalization is called, and then CUSTOM.pll is called.

Task/Business Requirement

Change LOV Query

CUSTOM.pll: Yes

Forms Personalization: Yes

a. Create a New Record Group

b. Attach new RG to LOV

Change field properties like Mandatory/Display etc

CUSTOM.pll: Yes

Forms Personalization: Yes

Zoom to another screen

CUSTOM.pll: Yes

Forms Personalization: Yes

a. Enable Menu
b. Trap the Menu event

Disable a Menu entry when certain conditions are met

CUSTOM.pll: Yes

Forms Personalization: No (Note1)

Display messages, warnings, hints etc

CUSTOM.pll: Yes

Forms Personalization: Yes

Display message with Questions, and conditionally execute code based on users response to the question

CUSTOM.pll: Yes

Forms Personalization: No

Execute PL/SQL Stored procedures

CUSTOM.pll: Yes

Forms Personalization: Yes

Change Navigation and Navigational Properties

CUSTOM.pll: Yes

Forms Personalization: Yes

Change block properties like “Query Where Clause” etc

CUSTOM.pll: Yes

Forms Personalization: Yes

Change is applicable across multiple screens, like Changing window title for all screens within one Organization/Responsibility

CUSTOM.pll: Yes

Forms Personalization: Yes (Note2)

Show FND Messages with their tokens replaced

CUSTOM.pll: Yes

Forms Personalization: Note3

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