Implementation Guide for Oracle Self-Service E-Billing > Customizing Oracle Self-Service E-Billing >

About the Billing and Payment Application

The Billing and Payment application is the online bill presentment and payment interface for users. For information about the preconfigured use cases provided in the Billing and Payment application, see Application Guide for Oracle Self-Service E-Billing (Business Edition) or Application Guide for Oracle Self-Service E-Billing (Consumer Edition).

The Oracle Self-Service E-Billing interfaces are built upon Struts and Tiles. The Struts actions talk with the Service APIs which then access different modules, such as Hierarchy or Reporting. The Billing and Payment application includes the following feature modules:

• Statement Module. This is the core J2EE functionality of Oracle Self-Service E-Billing software. The Statement module manages the access and display of statement data, enrollment, logging, and production (administrative) environment. Preconfigured presentment functionality includes bill summary, account, service, and usage summaries, usage detail, transaction detail, and the ability to dispute a transaction. A dashboard is provided for Business Edition users and includes a summary of recent charges across all accounts in a company.
• Payment Module. A complete payment scheduling and management with real-time and batch connections to payment gateways for Automated Clearing House (ACH) and credit card payments, and payments using various payment processing service providers. Includes user enrollment functions for both viewing and paying bills, setting up account information, making payments, scheduling payments, payment reminders, recurring payments, and so on. Administrative functions include setting up Payment jobs, Payment module settings, and viewing reports.
• User Management Module. A framework to authenticate and authorize a user using roles-based control (RBAC). After the user has been authenticated, the user can then access different Oracle Self-Service E-Billing features such as hierarchy, cost management, reports, and so on. Users can view personal profiles and optionally change their names, password, and email accounts.
• Unbilled Usage Module. Presents a report of detailed transactions, also called unbilled details, that have occurred since the last statement close date.
• Split Billing Module. A feature that lets a service provider define a set of rules that enables the application to categorize business and personal expenses for all transaction detail in a service agreement. The service provider can change the application order of the rules, the rule definition, and the number of rules to be applied. Users can manually change the automated split-billing categorization through the online application.
• Notifications Module. Users can configure personal event-based notification preferences that control the delivery of email messages or SMS messages to the user for events such as when a new bill is ready for viewing online or a payment is confirmed. Notification can be generated by a batch process following an event (batch notifications) or in response to a user action (instant notifications).
• Hierarchy Management Module. Manages the life cycle of a hierarchy: creation, modification, expiration, deletion, copy, move, search, hierarchy-based access control (HBAC), and so on.
• Analytics Module. Provides an analysis of group spending, group spending trends, account billing overview, details, and trends, contract billing overview and trends, contract call details, and total cost by plan. Chart type in reports (vertical bar, horizontal bar, stacked bar, multiple line, and pie chart) is selectable. All report row data can be configured into a trend report. Users can customize and save all report parameters. Ability to run reports from virtual nodes created when a user is assigned to two or more locations within a hierarchy.
• Cost and Budget Management Module. A set of tools to manage billing cost, such as rebill, cost reallocation, and budget management.
• Top X Reporting Module. Standard reports showing most expensive calls, longest calls, most frequently called numbers, destinations, or countries, highest spender, and highest spending contracts by usage type or call type. Users can also create a Find Calls report showing a list of calls based on a custom search.
• Database Presentment Engine. A framework to retrieve data from different data sources and present them as HTML, XML, or CSV. Offers features like paging, sorting, charting, bread-crumb, batch report, custom report, and so on.
• DB Access. The majority of the Oracle Self-Service E-Billing code uses Hibernate, which is an object-relational mapping tool, to access the Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) data. The access to OLAP is through direct JDBC call to boost performance.
• Transaction Management. Oracle Self-Service E-Billing uses distributed transaction (XA or JTA transaction) to manage Oracle Self-Service E-Billing database access and JMS access. The transaction is managed through the Spring Framework. The Spring framework is also used to manage object creations, and so on.
• Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) Schema. The schema for transactional data in the Oracle Self-Service E-Billing database, which includes transaction data such as user, account, services, and hierarchies.
• OLAP Schema. The schema for non-transaction data in the Oracle Self-Service E-Billing database, which includes billing data. It is a star-schema based data warehouse and includes dimensional tables, fact tables, and hierarchy tables.
• OLTP-OLAP Synchronizer. A process which synchronizes the information from the OLTP schema to the OLAP schema. Currently, the main information being synchronized is the hierarchy. Any change made to hierarchy on the OLTP side will be synchronized at OLAP. The OLAP hierarchy schema is specially designed for queue performance and different from the OLTP hierarchy schema. However, both schemas have the same content.

Default Installation Directory

• UNIX. /opt/Oracle/eBilling
• Windows. Oracle\eBilling

It is possible to change the default directory during installation. This guide refers to the directory where you have installed Oracle Self-Service E-Billing as EDX_HOME.

Billing and Payment Application EAR File Structure

This Billing and Payment application EAR file is in the EDX_HOME/eBilling/J2EEApps/ebilling/weblogic/ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear directory (or the EDX_HOME\eBilling\J2EEApps\ebilling\weblogic\ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear directory on Windows).

In general, you deploy the Billing and Payment application EAR file in a cluster environment for the purpose of failover and load balance.

The following components are packaged inside the ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear file:

• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear. This is the root directory and contains the EJB JavaARchive (JAR) and Web ARchive (WAR) files.
• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/lib. Contains the list of third-party lib files used by the Billing and Payment application.
• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/META-INF. Contains the J2EE META-INF directory.
• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/xma. Contains a list of internal library files used by the Billing and Payment application. In this directory there is one JAR file called api-version_number.jar. In this file, version_number is the Oracle Self-Service E-Billing version. This JAR file has all the public Oracle Self-Service E-Billing APIs defined.

The following components are packaged under the directories inside the Billing and Payment application WAR file, ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/ebilling-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war:

• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/ebilling-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war/_includes and ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/ebilling-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war/_templates. Contains JSP page fragments used by the Billing and Payment application. Many of these fragments are tiles.
• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/ebilling-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war/_assets. Contains images, JavaScripts, and CSS files used by the Billing and Payment application.
• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/ebilling-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war/hierarchy. Contains Hierarchy-related JSP pages.
• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/ebilling-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war/usermanagement. Contains User-Management-related JSP pages.
• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/ebilling-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war/reporting. Contains Reporting-related JSP pages.
• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/ebilling-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war/payment. Contains Payment-related JSP pages.
• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/ebilling-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war/contacts. Contains Contacts-related JSP pages.
• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/ebilling-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war/dispute. Contains Dispute-related JSP pages.
• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/ebilling-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war/unbilled. Contains Unbilled-related JSP pages.
• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/ebilling-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war/WEB-INF. Contains the J2EE WAR file WEB-INF directory.
• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/ebilling-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war/WEB-INF/classes/azcfg/policy. Contains the Oracle Self-Service E-Billing RBAC policy file.
• ebilling-weblogic-6.2.ear/ebilling-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war/WEB-INF/classes/lib. Contains libraries used by the WAR file.

NOTE:  Some of the WAR file subdirectories are inherited from another legacy Oracle Self-Service E-Billing application and are not used directly by Oracle Self-Service E-Billing.