1 Customizing and Extending Oracle Fusion Applications

The term personalization refers to the changes that every end user of the Oracle Fusion Applications product suite can make to certain artifacts in the user interface (UI) at runtime. These changes remain for that user each time that user logs in to the application. Personalization includes changes based on user behavior (such as changing the width of a column in a table), changes the user elects to save, such as search parameters, or composer-based personalizations, where an end user can redesign aspects of a page.

For composer-based personalizations, Oracle Fusion Applications includes Page Composer, which allows end users to change certain UI pages to suit their needs. For example, they can rearrange certain objects on a page, add and remove designated content, and save queries.

Runtime customizations and extensions include those that a business analyst can make to an Oracle Fusion application at runtime using browser-based composers. These customizations and extensions are visible and usable by all or by a subset of Oracle Fusion Applications users. The types of runtime customizations and extensions range from changing the look and feel of a page, to customizing standard objects, adding a new object and associated pages and application functionality, changing workflows, defining security for new objects, and customizing reports. (Note that not all products support all of these types of runtime customizations.)

Design time customizations and extensions include more complex changes, such as creating a SOA composite application or creating a new batch job, and they require deployment into the runtime environment. These design time customization and extensions are most often done by Java developers using Oracle JDeveloper (a comprehensive integrated development environment), as shown in the following figure, or they may be done in other tools, such as Oracle SOA Composer. The customizations are then uploaded or deployed to a running instance of Oracle Fusion Applications. Developer-level extensions are covered in this book.

Figure 1-1 Oracle JDeveloper

The user interfaces in Oracle Fusion applications are controlled by role-based authorization, meaning that the information presented in the UI, and what the user can do in the UI, depends on the roles assigned to the currently logged-in user. For example, if you are assigned a role with an administrative privilege, which grants you access to administrative functions and data, you will see an Administration group in the Settings and Actions menu. The menu items in the Administration group allow you to do things such as customize a page for all users and manage customizations.

Other core Oracle Fusion applications users and roles are created during the provisioning process. The identifies some of the seeded Oracle Fusion Applications duty roles related to customizations. These are available for review in the Oracle Authorization Policy Manager administration console and can be assigned to users in Oracle Identity Manager.

All the Oracle Fusion Applications products have roles with names like "Product Administrator Duty" or "Feature Administrator Duty", which inherit many of the items in the lists of roles that follow. These lists should prove especially useful when these standard roles need to be customized.

There are two key roles for this type of work:

• Application Developer role: Designed for most customization and development work. Useful for the Information Technology development team, but might be excessive for most functional users.

• Application Administrator role: Secures customization features within a product family, including adjusting the user-interface text and the navigator menus.

In addition, the following roles control specific features and functions that should be assigned and allocated as the users' tasks permit.

Both personalization and customization use Page Composer to make changes to an application page. Using personalization, any user can drag and drop fields, rearrange regions, add approved external content, and save their favorite queries.

Using administration customization, you also use Page Composer to customize pages for other users. You can add fields, add validation, change defaults, rearrange regions, and add external content. Page Composer allows you to work in a WYSIWYG view, and, in some cases, Source view.

To extend or customize the Sales, Marketing, Customer Center, Trading Community Architecture (TCA), and Order Capture applications that are part of the product family of Oracle Fusion Applications, use Application Composer.

Application Composer allows business analysts to make more complex runtime customizations to Oracle Fusion CRM applications. In addition to customizing pages, business analysts can customize objects and all the artifacts that support them (such as fields, pages, buttons and links, security, server scripts, and saved searches), and can also extend Oracle Fusion CRM applications by creating completely new objects and artifacts.

When new objects are created, you often also create associated Work Area pages for those objects. You can add those pages to the Navigator so that they can be accessed in the same way as standard objects.

When you create a new object in an application that is not a child of another object, you can also create a new object workflow to manage any business processes associated with it. For example, say you used Application Composer to create a marketing object and you want to create an associated approval flow. From within Application Composer, you can access Oracle Business Process Composer and create the process that defines that flow.

When you create a new object in Application Composer, you can define security policies for it. A security policy defines the end user's level of access to the data records of the object.

If you need to add an attribute to a business component in an application that is not one of the five applications, you can often use flexfields. A flexfield enables you to define attributes on a business component and then apply business logic to them. For example, an airline manufacturer might require very specific attributes for their orders that are not provided by the out-of-the-box implementation of an order. Because a flexfield exists for the order business component, you can use it to create and configure the desired attribute. Flexfield configurations are stored in an MDS repository, and so are safe during patching and upgrading.

Oracle Fusion Applications comes with a complete set of reports. You can customize these reports (for example, change the layout) to fit your particular business needs. Additionally, if you customize or create a business object, you can create a new report for that object.

To customize or create business objects outside of the five applications, or when required customizations cannot be made in one of the runtime composers, use JDeveloper. When you work in a JDeveloper environment, you create an application workspace that contains your changes and additions. When you create this application workspace, you do so in the Oracle Fusion Applications Developer role. Like Oracle Fusion Applications, JDeveloper uses roles to shape what you see and can do in the integrated development environment (IDE). Work done in a developer role is stored in actual projects with code that gets deployed to an environment. Use the Oracle Fusion Applications Administrator Customization role when customizing an existing standard object (as opposed to creating a new object). Work done in this role is saved to an XML file that gets deployed into an MDS repository, keeping your changes separate from the base code. For more information about how to set up your JDeveloper customization environment, see Using for Customizations .

Developers can use JDeveloper to create and customize view pages, business objects, task flows (reusable components that specify the control flow in an application), searches, and resource bundles. All customizations and extensions created in JDeveloper must be deployed to an environment. For more information about using JDeveloper to customize business objects and associated artifacts, see Customizing and Extending Application Artifacts.

SOA composite applications are the foundation on which Oracle Fusion applications are built: they are the glue that holds all the different components together and they allow the different applications to work in a unified manner. SOA composite applications contain service components such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) process flows. These BPEL process flows provide communication between applications, additional human-based workflows, and business rules that determine the branching in those flows. Developers can customize existing SOA composite applications or create new ones using a mixture of JDeveloper and browser-based tools. Customized and extended SOA composite applications are all stored in MDS repositories. For more information, see Customizing and Extending SOA Components .

Sometimes, to support analytics and reporting requirements, you might need to create new objects in the Oracle Business Intelligence repository (RPD), such as physical columns, logical tables sources, logical columns, and presentation columns. For information about modifying the RPD, see Modifying the Repository for Customized Analytics.

When you create custom pages, you may want to make them personalizable, so that end users can change the page for themselves. For more information, see Configuring End-User Personalization .

You can customize the look and feel of Oracle Fusion Applications, such as change the colors or add a logo. For more information, see Customizing the Skin .

Some customizations can be translated. For more information, see Translating Custom Text.

All the business analyst tools are available from the Navigator. However, for most design time tools, you must install and configure a version of JDeveloper that is certified for your Oracle Fusion Applications release. This version of JDeveloper, along with the necessary extensions for customizing and extending Oracle Fusion Applications, is in the release's Oracle Fusion Applications Media Pack, which is available from Oracle Software Delivery Cloud at http://edelivery.oracle.com. After installing JDeveloper, they must set up their environment for customization and extending.