Oracle Alert Naming Conventions
This section provides you with guidelines for naming your alerts, actions, action sets, escalation groups, and threshold groups. These guidelines help you give your alerts and alert components names that are unique, yet intuitive and easily understood by you and other Oracle Alert users.
General Naming Conventions
Follow these general naming conventions throughout Oracle Alert to take advantage of Oracle Alert's information search capabilities and list of values features.
Unique Initial Letters
Develop names with unique initial letters so you can autoreduce a list of values when entering names in fields that contain lists. Instead of naming two alerts Invoice Receipt Holds and Invoice Quantity Holds, choose names that adequately describe the alert but avoid the conflict of similar initial letters. Simply name them Receipt Holds and Quantity Holds. To select the Receipt Holds alert, you need to enter only one letter, R, to uniquely identify the alert and let Oracle Alert automatically enter the full name, Receipt Holds for you.
While avoiding similar initial letters is not always possible, the fewer characters you need to enter to establish a unique choice, the faster you can enter or query information. Entering action set names of Auditor and Administrator is easier than entering action set names of Payables Auditor and Payables Administrator. In the former case, you need only enter two characters, Au or Ad, to choose the correct action set.
Warning: Use characters other than the pound sign (#), the colon (:), or the percent sign (%) for your initial letter; as these characters are reserved for use in Enter Query mode.
Key Words
Develop names with memorable key words, or parts of words, somewhere in the name. For example, to take advantage of Oracle Alert's information search capabilities, you might describe all alerts that relate to invoices so that they have the word "invoice" somewhere in the name. Then, when you search for these alerts, you can simply enter your search criteria as "%invoice%" to retrieve all your alerts on invoices.
Alert-Specific Naming Conventions
Names
- Capitalize the first letter of every word.
- When naming an alert, do not use the word "Alert" in the name (e.g., New Employee Alert). If possible, use the name of the alert as the subject heading for any associated message actions.
Example: New Employee Notification
- When naming an action set, do not use the words "Action" or "Set". Relate the name of the action set to either the types of actions or the type of recipients. Try to limit the name to one or two words.
Example: Concurrent Requests
Purchasing Manager
- When naming a distribution list, make it plural unless it will always refer to only one person.
Example: Collections Managers
Descriptions
- Capitalize only the first letter of the first word.
- When writing an alert description, make the first word a verb.
Example: Informs the appropriate staff of new employees
- When writing a distribution list description, do not use the word "List". Instead, use the description to fully explain the use.
Example: Payroll managers at headquarters
See Also
Using a List of Values
