PeopleTools 8.52: Getting Started with PeopleTools

Development Tools

This section provides overview information and discusses:

PeopleSoft Application Designer.
PeopleCode.
PeopleSoft Application Engine.
Global Technology.
PeopleTools Internet Technology.
PeopleSoft Documents Technology.
PeopleSoft Search Technology.

Understanding Development Tools

The development tools that Enterprise PeopleTools provides offer a powerful application development environment in which you can build and customize PeopleSoft applications to suit your specific enterprise needs quickly and easily. By using Enterprise PeopleTools development tools you can complete a variety of tasks including:

Design and define application objects.
Enable applications to serve different locations and languages while sharing the same data.
Define end-to-end processes in a user-friendly, graphical design environment.

PeopleSoft Application Designer

PeopleSoft Application Designer is a metadata driven, interactive development environment (IDE) used to customize PeopleSoft applications.

Every PeopleSoft application contains a collection of related definitions, such as fields, records, pages, and components that work together to provide the functionality of PeopleSoft applications. Developing and adapting PeopleSoft applications is a step-by-step process in which you configure and build the definitions, establish relationships among definitions, implement security, register your PeopleSoft application to the PeopleTools portal environment, and test every aspect thoroughly.

To perform the majority of these development activities, you use one interactive tool, PeopleSoft Application Designer. The PeopleSoft Application Designer is an integrated development environment that enables you to work with the numerous definitions of a business application in a single work area.

PeopleSoft Application Designer enables you to perform numerous development tasks including:

Create and modify field and record definitions.
Build and run SQL scripts that create and alter tables and indexes.
Create and debug PeopleCode.
Create and modify pages for the user interface.
Create and modify components (groups of pages).
Work with style sheets to customize the appearance of applications.
Upgrade your existing applications to newer PeopleSoft versions.

PeopleCode

PeopleCode is the PeopleSoft proprietary integrated programming language that touches virtually every aspect of PeopleSoft applications. For example, with PeopleCode you can:

Control presentation of information to the user.
Implement complex business logic that cannot be defined with metadata.
Validate user inputs.
Perform calculations and data manipulation.
Maintain data integrity.
Update database tables.
Manage portal navigation.
Integrate with other PeopleSoft applications.
Integrate with third-party applications.
Manage workflow.
Administer security.

PeopleCode enables you to create programs using structured and object-oriented techniques. PeopleSoft delivers numerous PeopleCode functions, classes, methods, and APIs.

See Also

Getting Started with PeopleCode

PeopleSoft Application Engine

PeopleSoft Application Engine enables you to develop, test, and run Application Engine programs. You use PeopleSoft Application Engine to develop batch or online programs that perform high-volume, background processing against your data.

In PeopleSoft Application Engine, a program is a set of SQL statements, PeopleCode, and program control actions that enable looping and conditional logic. Common batch programming needs, like parallel processing and restartability, are built into PeopleSoft Application Engine programs.

You define PeopleSoft Application Engine programs in PeopleSoft Application Designer.

See Also

Getting Started With Application Engine

Global Technology

PeopleSoft applications are built on a robust global framework enabling you to deploy your applications across the globe. Enterprise PeopleTools is designed so that a single implementation can serve users in different regions. Users can share the same data while operating in different languages and applying different date, time, and numeric formatting conventions.

PeopleSoft's global technology provides the core global abilities that are common to all PeopleSoft application products enabling you to:

Operate in your own language.
Apply different numeric formatting.
Use any currency and market rate.
Support multiple languages in a single database.
Display formatted data using standards that users expect based on their language and country.
Deploy systems spanning multiple time zones.

See Also

Getting Started with Global Technology

PeopleTools Internet Technology

The Enterprise PeopleTools internet technologies are a multiplicity of internet-specific tools that enable you to create and manage your PeopleSoft applications and their components in the portal environment.

PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture enables internet application deployment through a browser, and enables you to take advantage of PeopleSoft intranet solutions, and integration technologies. PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture runs seamlessly in portals created and managed by PeopleSoft portal technologies.

The foundation of PeopleTools portal technology is the PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture, which provides you with the ability to easily access and administer a broad range of content providers, such as PeopleSoft applications like CRM and HCM, as well as non-PeopleSoft content. It enables you to combine content from a variety of sources and deliver that content to your application in an elegant, unified, intuitive, user-friendly interface.

PeopleSoft Documents Technology

PeopleSoft documents technology includes a Document Builder, a PeopleCode API, and several utilities that enable you to create, manage, and test documents.

The Document Builder enables you to build XML documents from the ground up, by importing schema definitions, or from PeopleSoft table definitions. A PeopleCode API is provided to enable you to populate and retrieve document data. PeopleSoft delivers a number of document utilities to help you validate documents during and after construction, validate schema, resolve copy project, import, and upgrade metadata issues, and more.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is the default physical representation of PeopleSoft documents.

Documents are used to simplify integrations with third-party integration partners, as an alternative to using stand-alone rowsets, as a mechanism to distribute complex data, and more.

PeopleSoft Search Technology

PeopleSoft Search Technology consists of these features:

PeopleSoft Search Framework
PeopleSoft Search

PeopleSoft Search Framework

The PeopleSoft Search Framework enables application developers and implementation teams, to create search artifacts in a declarative manner, using PeopleSoft Query and Connected Query and to deploy and maintain searchable objects, using one standard interface, regardless of PeopleSoft application. The PeopleSoft Search Framework consists of PeopleSoft components (pages and records provided by PeopleTools), which provide a centralized interface for configuring PeopleSoft integration with the search engine, creating search definitions, search categories, and building and maintaining search indexes.

Note. The PeopleSoft Search Framework relies on Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) for all search engine tasks.

PeopleSoft Search

Once Search Framework is configured you can enable these PeopleSoft Search features for your end users:

Application Search.
Search Pages.

With Application Search enabled, a Application Search bar displays in the header of the PeopleSoft application. The Application Search bar provides a dropdown list for selecting a specific search category against which to run a search. The results enable the end user to navigate to the appropriate record or transaction simply by clicking a link.

If you’ve enabled the Search Pages features, a Keyword Search tab appears amongst the search pages the end user encounters when navigating into a component. The Keyword Search page enables users to execute a deeper, more free-form search to access application data than the traditional "Find an Existing Value" tab. The traditional "Find an Existing Value" tab is limited to level 0 data, where the Keyword Search tab lets the users enter custom keywords and the system will search indexed data from level 0-3.