Benefits of Flexfields
Flexfields provide you with the features you need to satisfy the following business needs:
- Customize your applications to conform to your current business practice for accounting codes, product codes, and other codes.
- Customize your applications to capture data that would not otherwise be tracked by your application.
- Have "intelligent fields" that are fields comprised of one or more segments, where each segment has both a value and a meaning.
- Rely upon your application to validate the values and the combination of values that you enter in intelligent fields.
- Have the structure of an intelligent field change depending on data in your form or application data.
- Customize data fields to your meet your business needs without programming.
- Query intelligent fields for very specific information.
What is the distinction between flexfields and application features? Flexfields, while they are a major feature of the Oracle Applications as a whole, are merely a mechanism to provide many application features. Key flexfields provide a flexible way for the Oracle Applications to represent objects such as accounting codes, part numbers, job descriptions, and more. For example, the Accounting Flexfield is a feature that uses a key flexfield to represent accounting codes throughout most of the Oracle Applications. Similarly, descriptive flexfields provide a flexible way for the Oracle Applications to provide customizable "expansion space" in forms, as well as a way to implement context-sensitive fields that appear only when needed. Both types of flexfield let you customize Oracle Applications features without programming.
See Also
Basic Flexfields Concepts
Overview of Setting up Flexfields
