Welcome to Release 12.1 of the Oracle Configurator Modeling Guide.
This book contains information you need for designing configuration models that are best suited to Oracle Configurator. This book focuses on model design and does not present other information about planning Oracle Configurator projects such as preparing your site and team for implementation and scheduling tasks.
Use this document together with the other books in the Oracle Configurator documentation set to prepare for and implement high performance configuration model designs.
This preface describes how the book is organized, who the intended audience is, and how to interpret the typographic conventions.
This guide is intended for Oracle Consultants and implementers of Oracle Configurator who have completed Oracle Configurator training or have experience using Oracle Configurator Developer. Oracle Configurator training is available through Oracle University.
Before using this book, you should already have a working knowledge of your business processes, how to create configuration models using Oracle Applications, and the other books in the Oracle Configurator documentation set.
See Related Information Sources for more Oracle E-Business Suite product information.
To reach Oracle Support Services, use a telecommunications relay service (TRS) to call Oracle Support at 1.800.223.1711. An Oracle Support Services engineer will handle technical issues and provide customer support according to the Oracle service request process. Information about TRS is available at http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/trs.html, and a list of phone numbers is available at http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/dro/trsphonebk.html.
Our goal is to make Oracle products, services, and supporting documentation accessible to all users, including users that are disabled. To that end, our documentation includes features that make information available to users of assistive technology. This documentation is available in HTML format, and contains markup to facilitate access by the disabled community. Accessibility standards will continue to evolve over time, and Oracle is actively engaged with other market-leading technology vendors to address technical obstacles so that our documentation can be accessible to all of our customers. For more information, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program Web site at http://www.oracle.com/accessibility/.
Screen readers may not always correctly read the code examples in this document. The conventions for writing code require that closing braces should appear on an otherwise empty line; however, some screen readers may not always read a line of text that consists solely of a bracket or brace.
This documentation may contain links to Web sites of other companies or organizations that Oracle does not own or control. Oracle neither evaluates nor makes any representations regarding the accessibility of these Web sites.
2 Planning Your Model Design
This chapter describes the high level flow of starting a project and designing configuration models. The chapter also presents guidelines to help you plan your Oracle Configurator project and determine which design questions you should ask.
For information about planning and starting an Oracle Configurator project, see the Oracle Configurator training available through Oracle University.
Before reading this chapter, review the planning guidelines in Planning Your Model Design to help identify areas of special considerations in an Oracle Configurator project.
This chapter presents the design questions you should ask yourself in order to identify which best practices apply to your project.
Read through the questions on the following pages to help you identify relevant design decisions that are presented as some of the best practices and case studies in the following chapters. This list of design questions is intended as a starting point and does not include all the questions that are useful to ask as you begin your Oracle Configurator project.
Before reading this chapter, review the design questions in Starting Your Model Design to help you identify best practices that are relevant to your Oracle Configurator project.
Applying the following best practices in various combinations will improve the performance, usability, maintenance, and scalability of your configuration models.
Many of these best practices include detailed instructions. You can gain useful information by reading all of them, even though some are not directly connected to a design question. To understand these best practices, you must be familiar with the specifics of creating configuration models. See the Oracle Configurator Developer User’s Guide for details.
This chapter describes an Oracle Configurator project involving many large BOM Models with much explicit and repetitive structure that is best modeled as a single top-level BOM Model containing a deep hierarchy of generic structure and abstractions.
This chapter describes an Oracle Configurator project involving many BOM Items that are not orderable and could be better implemented as Features or configuration attributes. Configuration attributes are explained in Oracle Configurator Methodologies.
This appendix contains some SQL*Plus queries that are useful for calculating the total number of nodes in a configuration model, and the number of different types of nodes in a configuration model.
For a full list of documentation resources for Oracle Configurator, see the Oracle Configurator Release Notes for this release.
For a full list of documentation resources for Oracle Applications, see Oracle Applications Documentation Resources, on MetaLink, Oracle's technical support Web site.
Additionally, be sure you are familiar with current release or patch information for Oracle Configurator on MetaLink, Oracle's technical support Web site.
The Oracle Integration Repository is a compilation of information about the service endpoints exposed by the Oracle E-Business Suite of applications. It provides a complete catalog of Oracle E-Business Suite's business service interfaces. The tool lets users easily discover and deploy the appropriate business service interface for integration with any system, application, or business partner.
The Oracle Integration Repository is shipped as part of the E-Business Suite. As your instance is patched, the repository is automatically updated with content appropriate for the precise revisions of interfaces in your environment.
Oracle STRONGLY RECOMMENDS that you never use SQL*Plus, Oracle Data Browser, database triggers, or any other tool to modify Oracle E-Business Suite data unless otherwise instructed.
Oracle provides powerful tools you can use to create, store, change, retrieve, and maintain information in an Oracle database. But if you use Oracle tools such as SQL*Plus to modify Oracle E-Business Suite data, you risk destroying the integrity of your data and you lose the ability to audit changes to your data.
Because Oracle E-Business Suite tables are interrelated, any change you make using an Oracle E-Business Suite form can update many tables at once. But when you modify Oracle E-Business Suite data using anything other than Oracle E-Business Suite, you may change a row in one table without making corresponding changes in related tables. If your tables get out of synchronization with each other, you risk retrieving erroneous information and you risk unpredictable results throughout Oracle E-Business Suite.
When you use Oracle E-Business Suite to modify your data, Oracle E-Business Suite automatically checks that your changes are valid. Oracle E-Business Suite also keeps track of who changes information. If you enter information into database tables using database tools, you may store invalid information. You also lose the ability to track who has changed your information because SQL*Plus and other database tools do not keep a record of changes.