Introduction to Customizing and Extending Oracle Fusion Applications

Oracle Fusion provides the below tools to customize and extend Fusion Applications at design and runtime

• Page Composer

• CRM Application Composer

• Oracle SOA Composer

• Oracle JDeveloper

• Business Process Composer

Fusion Applications implements a sandbox framework, whereby all Composer changes can be first made and stored in a virtual sandbox environment of your choosing. This ring-fences them so they can be safely tested and verified, whilst invisible to other users on the live system. Once complete they can be published one at a time or all together into the system for general use.

All supported customizations and extensions are stored and applied in the context of a Meta Data Services (MDS)Layer. MDS defines the context for which the customization will be applied over the standard features at runtime. Some commonly used examples of MDS layers are a User, a Job Role, an Organization, or across a whole Site.

   The composers are generally intended for Super User, Domain Manager, or Business Analysts type roles, with standard Personalization (with a few features from Page Composer) serving the needs of end users. For more extensive and invasive technical projects a connection between a local JDeveloper IDE (with the required setup) and a Fusion Applications instance is required. The tools to use for each type of activity are highlighted in the Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide.

1.  Page Composer

       End user / Business Analyst can personalize the UI at run time, they can rearrange certain objects on the page, changing the width of the field, saving search parameters are called composer based personalization.

• Change a Page Layout for one or more users
• Discover, Implement, and Add Seed Data to Flexfields
• Add a new Field onto a page

2. CRM Application Composer

       CRM Product Family has one additional composer, the CRM Application Composer, providing more advanced functionality for creating custom business objects and actions. 

Where basic options like flexfields are not enough to support the additional data attributes required for your business operation, the Data Composer (Available only in CRM Application Composer) allows access to edit and create ADF Business Objects. Just to be clear, these are not new database fields or records, but the abstraction of them based on real-world entities, such as Purchase Orders or Customers. It is the ADF Business Objects that are used at runtime by the user interface.

Oracle 12c Top Features

   This article is mainly focused for developers 

• Row Limiting Clause for Top-N Queries
• Top-N queries provide a method for limiting the number of rows returned from ordered sets of data. They are extremely useful when you want to return the top or bottom "N" number of rows from a set or when you are paging through data

SELECT *

FROM   table_name

ORDER BY column_name

LIMIT 0 , 50

[ OFFSET offset { ROW | ROWS } ]

[ FETCH { FIRST | NEXT } [ { rowcount | percent PERCENT } ]

{ ROW | ROWS } { ONLY | WITH TIES } ]

SELECT column1

FROM   table_name

ORDER BY column1 DESC

FETCH FIRST 20 ROWS ONLY

• WITH Clause Enhancements
• We can declare PL/SQL functions and procedures in the WITH Clause of a select statement

WITH

  PROCEDURE with_procedure(p_id IN NUMBER) IS

  BEGIN

    DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line('p_id=' || p_id);

  END;

  FUNCTION with_function(p_id IN NUMBER) RETURN NUMBER IS

  BEGIN

    with_procedure(p_id);

    RETURN p_id;

  END;

SELECT with_function(id)

FROM   table_name

WHERE  rownum = 1

• Duplicate Indexes
• Can have both B-tree and bitmap index on same column(s) 

• VARCHAR2(32K)
• Currently max is 4000 bytes  

• Auto-populate column from a sequence 
• Using the DEFAULT clause for a column in create table 

CREATE TABLE table_name (

  col1        NUMBER DEFAULT default_seq.NEXTVAL,

  col2        NUMBER DEFAULT ON NULL default_on_null_seq.NEXTVAL,

  description VARCHAR2(30)

);

• Implicit Result Sets
• DBMS_SQL.RETURN_RESULT and DBMS_SQL.GET_NEXT_RESULT
• Result sets that can be returned to a client, but do not necessitate a formal named parameter. The client code to process such a result set is identical now - the client code needs not change, the stored procedure signature need not change

• PL/SQL Unit Security
• Grant access to a PL/SQL unit by granting a role to a PL/SQL unit, where the role contains the required rights for accessing the tables - so a function can only select, update etc from a table where it has been granted access.

• Invisible Columns
• Hide columns form the table in select and describe
• SET COLINVISIBLE ON / OFF to display the invisible columns.

CREATE TABLE table_name (

  col1        NUMBER,

  col2        NUMBER INVISIBLE,

  description VARCHAR2(30)

);

• UTL_CALL_STACK for programmatically inspecting the PL/SQL Call Stack
• UTL_CALL_STACK package provides an API for inspecting the PL/SQL Callstack. The package complements the DBMS_ UTILITY.FORMAT_CALL_STACK that returns a pretty print human readable overview of the callstack.

Example

• Pluggable Databases (Multitenant)
• Create a container database (CDB) that contains all of the oracle level data and data dictionary.  Create pluggable databases (PDB) that contain user data and the user portion of the data dictionary. Since the PDB files contain everything about the user data, you can unplug a PDB from a CDB and plug it into a different CDB and be up in seconds. All that needs to happen is a quick data dictionary update in the CDB.