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Warning: You should never change or delete a predefined value set that Oracle Applications supply. Such changes may unpredictably affect the behavior of your application features such as reporting.

You can use this region to define a value set that lets your users enter an entire key flexfield combination within a single report parameter. For example, you may want to pass concatenated Accounting Flexfield segments as a parameter to a report. With this type of value set, a user can enter the report parameter and then see the "normal" behavior of a key flexfield, such as the key flexfield window and segment validation associated with that key flexfield. You use Oracle Application Object Library flexfield routines for these special value sets.

You should take special care to avoid a situation where you have a value set that contains a flexfield which in turn contains a flexfield (as a value set of one of its segments). There are two situations where this could cause a problem. The first situation (recursion) is where a flexfield calls itself as one of its segments, leading to an infinite chain of pop-up windows. Such a loop may also be indirect. The second potential problem may lead to data truncation and data corruption problems: since a flexfield is often passed as its concatenated flexfield values, the length of these concatenated flexfields can quickly exceed the maximum size of the value set and the underlying segment column in the flexfield table. This is less likely to cause a problem for key flexfields than for descriptive flexfields or range flexfields, because key flexfields are usually passed as a single code combination ID number instead of as concatenated segment values and therefore take less space. Though the Value Sets windows and the Flexfield Segments windows do not prevent you from defining flexfield loops or multiple flexfields within flexfields, you can cause serious truncation problems and possible data corruption problems in your application by allowing this to occur.

Warning: Plan and define your value sets carefully to avoid value sets within value sets as described above.

See:

Key Flexfield Segments

Descriptive Flexfield Segments

See Also

Choosing a Validation Type for Your Value Set

Value Set Windows

Special Validation Routines Window