Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Core Development and Extension Cookbook: Building extensions in Oracle E-Business Suite is greatly simplified when you follow the step-by-step instructions in this book. Whether novice or pro, this is a great tutorial with over 60 recipes and stacks of screenshots.

The E-Business Suite (EBS) user interface developed with Oracle Forms Builder is known as the Professional User Interface. The core modules have all been built using this development tool. However, the user interface for new modules is now developed using JDeveloper and is known as the Self Service User Interface.

Oracle provides a TEMPLATE form to get us started with developing forms. It has some referenced objects that allow us to develop forms in a consistent manner using the same standards and look and feel as all of the other forms within EBS. The referenced objects contain property classes and visual attributes, the standard toolbar, and the standard calendar. It also comes with code already written in triggers and program units. These help us to provide hooks to events that occur at runtime. This in turn ensures that any forms developed using the TEMPLATE.fmb conforms to Oracle standards and behaviors. Also, it makes it much easier for developers knowing that forms...

We are going to briefly look at forms builder before we start developing a new form. E-Business Suite does not use some features of the forms developer IDE such as alerts or reports. There are also some functions in EBS that replace some of the standard Oracle Forms built-ins. We will look at some of these in the coming chapters. Let's start by looking at the interface and discussing the features that need to be highlighted before we get started. The following screenshot shows us the forms developer once we have opened the TEMPLATE form:

We will discuss the IDE and the features available before we get going:

Create the database objects for this chapter before you start by using a script provided called 4842_02_01.sh. We are going to create a table, a view, and a synonym for the new block we will create. We will also create a package that will handle all of the database transactions such as insert, update, and delete. Finally, we will create a sequence that will be used to generate a unique number for new records. The following recipe provides details of how to run the script.

In this recipe, we are going to look at getting everything started so that we can build forms to be used in E-Business Suite. We are going to be using Oracle Forms Builder version 10g and we are also going to be using WinSCP.

In this recipe, we are going to perform the following tasks:

In this recipe, we are going to start on the basics of a master detail form. There are several tasks that we will need to do:

We have already created two views to base our form on at the beginning of this chapter. The views are called XXHR_PERMGR_DETAILS_V and XXHR_PERSON_DETAILS_V. It is always better to base the block on a view, especially for more complex blocks that use multiple tables. There are several reasons for this; for example, it will reduce network traffic and we will not need to write PRE and POST trigger code for non-database fields.

In this recipe, we are going to modify the code in the TEMPLATE.fmb form. There are certain triggers that need to be modified when creating a new form. The shell is there, we just need to modify the code to make the form function properly. We need to modify code in the following objects:

We are now ready to create a detail block to our form. The detail block is going to store information relating to societies the employee belongs to. The block is a detail block to the PERMGR_DTLS block we have already created. The foreign key is the PERSON_ID. In this recipe, we are going to perform the following tasks:

We have already created a table called XXHR_PER_SOCIETIES...

Now that we have created the forms objects, it is time to start adding some code. We need to add code to perform inserts, updates, and deletes. As we have based the form on views, we need to trigger the events and then we need to write code to call database procedures to transact data. There are four triggers we need to create on each block where we need to perform transactions. In this example, the only block where we want to do any transactions is the PER_SOCIETIES block. When we insert data, we will also need to increment a sequence number for the SOCIETY_ID column. We will need to perform the following tasks to trigger and code database transactions within our form:

We have created a sequence as we need to generate a unique SOCIETY_ID before...

Now we have created the form, we should test it. We cannot run the form locally on our PC, so we need to transfer it to the application tier and compile it. We also need to register the form and create a function for it. Then we can add the function to a menu. In this recipe, we are going to perform the following tasks:

Now that we have created the form and it is running, we want to add some buttons and change the types of fields that we have created in the form. In this recipe, we are going to perform the following tasks:

As part of the TEMPLATE form, we get a standard mechanism to create a query screen. This usually is the first screen that is present when the form opens if no data is passed to the form via parameters. This allows the user to search for specific records. In our form, we want to create a query form that allows us to search for an employee. We want the user to be able to search by their name or their employee number. There are a number of steps required to implement a QUERY_FIND window. In this recipe, we are going to perform the following tasks:

We can pass parameters to a form to pass data that can help us to perform actions based upon that data. In this case, we want to add a parameter which passes in the PERSON_ID. If the parameter is populated with a value, we do not want to call the query screen. In this recipe, we are going to perform the following tasks: