How to Add a New Zone

The steps necessary to add a new zone depend on the zone's zone type. For example, if you want to add a new zone that references one of the Oracle Utilities Business Intelligence zone types, no programming is necessary (you simply add a new zone using the above transaction the zone's parameters).

However, if you need to add a new zone with an idiosyncratic service or user interface, you must involve a programmer. Let's use an example to help clarify what you can do versus what a programmer must do. Assume that you want to add a new account characteristics zone to Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing. To do this you must:

• Create a new service that retrieves the data to appear in your zone.
• Create a new XSLT template file (or reuse an existing one) that formats the data.
• Set up the appropriate zone type meta-data. The zone type will reference a Java class that is responsible for taking the data from your service and applying an XSL template to generate the HTML fragment that displays in the zone.
• Create a zone called Account Characteristics (or something similar). On this zone, define the name of the service that you created above. You'd also define the various parameter values required by the zone type, such as the service name, XSLT template location, and key fields. If we assume that your account characteristics zone needs to know the account ID, you'd indicate ACCT_ID as one of your key parameter values.
• After creating the new zone, you can reference it on a portal or as a context-sensitive zone or both.

If you want to create more complex zones, you have two options:

• You can use the simple zone type that passes through any HTML fragment that you want to display. In your HTML fragment, you can use an iframe and/or JSP to do the complicated data processing and formatting.
• If the simple zone type will not work for your needs, you may need to create your own zone type.