Planning Your Key Flexfield
Your first step in planning your key flexfields is to determine which key flexfields your Oracle Applications product requires. You should also determine the purpose of the key flexfield, as well as the number and length of its available segment columns (See: Key Flexfields in Oracle Applications). You should also note whether your key flexfield allows more than one structure, and determine if you do indeed need to define more than one structure. For example, the System Items Flexfield (Item Flexfield) supports only one structure.
Those key flexfields that allow multiple structures may use different mechanisms to determine which structure a user sees. For example, the Accounting Flexfield uses multiple structures if you have multiple sets of books with differing charts of accounts. Your forms determine which Accounting Flexfield structure to display by using the value of the GL_SET_OF_BOOKS_ID profile option associated with your current responsibility. Other key flexfields may have a field built into the form that allow a user to essentially choose which structure appears. See: Key Flexfields in Oracle Applications.
You should decide on the number, order and length of your segments for each structure. You must also choose how to validate each segment. See: Overview of Values and Value Sets.
When you are planning your flexfields, you should consider the following questions and their corresponding decisions:
How do you want to break down reporting on your key flexfield data? If you want to report on your data by certain criteria or sub-entities, such as account number or project or region, you may want to consider making that sub-entity a distinct segment, rather than combining it with another sub-entity, so that you can categorize and report on smaller discrete units of information.
How often does your organization change? This would affect how you set up your values. For example, if you disable old cost centers and enable new ones frequently, you would "use up" cost center values quickly. You would therefore want to use a larger maximum size for your cost center value set so that you can have more available values (for example, you have 1000 available values for a 3-character value set instead of 100 available values for a 2-character value set).
Do you want to require a value for each segment?
See Also
Intelligent Key
Combination
Combinations Table
Qualifiers
Dynamic Insertion
Other Key Flexfield Features
Key Flexfield Structure Planning Diagram