Deriving / Passing In Characteristic Values

In An Illustration Of A Rate Factor And Its Characteristics, we described how the system retrieves a characteristic value from a location when a rate factor is encountered that uses a location characteristic. This is a very common technique and is easy to understand. However, there are situations when an entity in Oracle Enterprise Taxation and Policy Management doesn't contain the appropriate characteristic value and therefore other techniques must be used. These techniques may not apply to your implementation, but they're worth understanding to help you form an intuitive understanding of rate application:

• Assume you have a charge that is based on the account's account type and the obligation's revenue class. This type of charge's characteristic value is not extractable from a single entity. Rather, the system must construct the characteristic value real-time by concatenating information from the account and obligation being billed. In this situation, you can use an RQ rule to derive this characteristic type and value. This RQ rule would create a characteristic type and value real time by concatenating the account's account type and the obligation's revenue class. This characteristic type and value only exists in memory while rate application executes. This is an example of the system deriving a characteristic value as opposed to it being passed in or retrieved from another object in the system.

When you setup a rate factor to use a characteristic whose value is derived or passed in, you need to define its characteristic source as Characteristics Collection. This source tells the system to extract the characteristic value from memory rather than extracting it from an object within the system.