3 Oracle Fusion Middleware Components for Oracle Fusion Applications

This chapter describes the common core framework and infrastructure components of Oracle Fusion Middleware as used by Oracle Fusion Applications.

This chapter contains the following topics:

• Oracle Fusion Middleware Extensions for Applications

• Oracle Enterprise Scheduler

• Oracle Enterprise Crawl and Search Framework (ECSF)

3.1 Oracle Fusion Middleware Extensions for Applications

Oracle Fusion Middleware Extensions for Applications (Applications Core) is an Oracle Fusion Middleware extension that provides design-time and runtime infrastructure components to help standardize complex development patterns for Oracle Fusion Applications. These components simplify the development process of these patterns and provide a consistent user experience. Examples of these components include the page template (UI Shell), extensibility (Flexfields), hierarchical relationships (Trees), and attachments.

The UI Shell is a page template containing default information, such as a logo, menus and facets. The UI Shell design supports task-based and user-based navigation, and organizes screen usage effectively by collating tasks, providing dedicated spaces for primary-task supporting information, and maintaining general order and appropriate hierarchy among various elements on the screen.

Flexfields enable related attributes and user interface (UI) components to be dynamically created based on keys from the controlling data. There are three types of flexfields that enable implementers to configure application features without programming and are fully supported within Oracle Fusion Applications:

• Descriptive flexfields

• Extensible flexfields

• Key flexfields

Oracle Fusion Applications tree management enables data in applications to be organized into a hierarchical fashion, and enables you to create tree hierarchies based on specific data. The advantages of using tree hierarchies to develop applications include:

• Reusable code that results in a one-time-only implementation of many tree-management features, and can be used immediately by every type of application hierarchy.

• Open metadata that can be read by any application that needs to use tree-management hierarchies.

• Tree structures that capture the business rules to which the data must adhere.

• ADF Business Components view objects that are used as data sources, eliminating the need to build new types of data sources.

• Hierarchical relationships between entities that are external to the entity itself, that enables multiple hierarchical views to be implemented for the same set of entities. Each of these hierarchies can be used to implement a different business function.

• Data flattening that improves query performance against the hierarchical data, especially for hierarchical queries such as roll-up queries.

• Business events that can be consumed by any application requiring additional processing on specific tree operations.

• Tree- and node-level access control that eliminates the need for product teams to write their own access-control code.

• Well-defined APIs available for metadata and data that make it easy to write migration tools for existing hierarchies in Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and Siebel.

The Attachment component provides a declarative programming mechanism for adding attachments to the UI pages that you create for Oracle Fusion web applications. Once added to a UI page, the component gives users the ability to associate a URL, desktop file, repository file or folder, or text with a business object, such as an expense report, contract, or purchase order.

Applications Core creates simplified methods of implementing these complex requirements by providing robust metadata and comprehensive UI components and services. All of the Applications Core components have been integrated with the rest of the Oracle Fusion Middleware infrastructure so that they are available across every layer of the Oracle Fusion Applications platform.

3.2 Oracle Enterprise Scheduler

Oracle Enterprise Scheduler provides the ability to define, schedule, and run different types of jobs. You can run jobs on demand, or schedule them to run in the future.

Oracle Enterprise Scheduler provides scheduling services for the following purposes:

• To distribute job request processing across a grid of application servers

• To run Java, PL/SQL, spawned jobs, binary processes, and Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher reports

• To process multiple jobs concurrently

• To schedule job requests to run a single time in the future, on a recurring basis, or based on triggering events

• To run the same job in different languages

Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Applications Control (Fusion Applications Control) enables you to start and stop, monitor, configure, and manage Oracle Enterprise Scheduler services, components, and job requests.

The main Oracle Enterprise Scheduler page provides information for you to monitor activity and diagnose problems.

Oracle Enterprise Scheduler provides support for the following features:

• Workshifts enable you to configure windows of time during which jobs can run, such as running high CPU jobs only at night.

• Job dependencies and incompatibilities enable you to, for example, run import jobs before report jobs, or ensure that a payroll job does not run at the same time as a salary increase.

• Throttling and prioritization using work assignments enable you to, for example, ensure that no more than 70 Oracle Fusion Financials jobs should run concurrently. A newly submitted Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management job should not wait for 5,000 Oracle Fusion Financials jobs to execute.

Fusion Applications Control enables you to define, control, and manage Oracle Enterprise Scheduler job metadata, including job definitions, job sets (a collection of job requests), incompatibilities (job definitions that cannot run at the same time for a given application), and schedules governing the execution of job requests. It also provides you with the ability to create new jobs.

For more information, see the "Working with Extensions to Oracle Enterprise Scheduler" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Applications Developer's Guide.

3.3 Oracle Enterprise Crawl and Search Framework (ECSF)

ECSF is an Oracle Fusion Middleware search framework with a metadata-driven, declarative design time and runtime interface. It exposes application context information on business objects for full-text transactional search.

The integration of ECSF, Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (Oracle SES), and a source system, such as a relational database where the searchable information resides, forms Oracle Fusion Applications Search. Oracle Fusion Applications Search is the search platform that provides a seamless search experience to the Oracle Fusion Applications user for easily locating and taking action on relevant data.

Benefits of ECSF include:

• Transparent integration of applications with search engines, which minimizes development time and maximizes the user experience with search

• Code reuse, through use of a well-designed set of abstract classes, to reduce long design cycles

• Basic platform for developing a search mechanism, which helps new developers grasp the conceptual flow of work easily

• Centralized process and control mechanism, which enhances search functionality

• Wide range of optimizations that offer better control to leverage search results

Key ECSF features that are built on top of Oracle SES and enhance the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience when searching include:

• Basic search, which enables queries based on keyword and search category.

• Advanced search, which enables queries based on a keyword, a search category, and up to 100 attribute filters.

• Faceted navigation, which enables the filtering of search results based on attributes of the business objects. Users can navigate a search result set based on a set of predefined facets, or dimensions. This feature returns a list of facets and their associated set of available values with the search result. Users can select a value for each facet, which is then submitted with the search query in order to narrow down the result set.

• Actionable results, which are search results with action links associated with the searchable objects. From the search results users can either go straight to the page displaying the record they selected, or they can invoke a specific task on a search result.

• Saved searches, which enables saved search criteria for later use. Users can create new saved search entries, edit and delete existing saved search entries, and retrieve user-specified or public saved search entries.

• File attachments, which enable the crawling of attachments that are associated with Oracle Fusion Applications transactional objects or records.

• Crawling, or gathering information from, Oracle WebCenter Portal tags, which supports crawling searchable objects that contain WebCenter Portal tags.

• Crawling tree structures, which supports search functionality on source systems containing data that is organized in a tree structure (for example, Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Catalog).

• Search support for external data sources, which enables querying against search groups that contain external data sources, which are non-ECSF related data sources, such as wiki pages and blogs, that are directly crawled by Oracle SES.

For more information, see the "Using Oracle Enterprise Crawl and Search Framework" part in the Oracle Fusion Applications Developer's Guide and the "Managing Search with Oracle Enterprise Crawl and Search Framework" section in the Oracle Fusion Applications Administrator's Guide.