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Best Practices for Customizing Oracle Billing Insight

It is recommended that you follow these best practice guidelines when customizing the Self-Service or Assisted Service applications:

• Oracle Billing Insight provides a set of core functionality in the applications. A sample UI, included with the product, demonstrates these functions. The contract between Oracle Billing Insight core and the UI is a set of APIs. These APIs and the Java-docs are contained in the API JAR file of the EAR file. You must use these APIs for your customization purposes. Do not modify or bypass these APIs unless explicitly instructed in this guide.
• Because of the complexity of the Hierarchy Management UI, it is recommended that you try and keep your UI as close as possible to the sample hierarchy UI to reduce your workload.
• The functions exposed by the APIs exceed the ones demonstrated through the sample UI. Consult the API Java-docs and other topics of this guide for details. You can customize the Oracle Billing Insight application to take advantage of these functions.
• When you have to change existing Oracle Billing Insight files, such as a JSP or a Velocity template, you can work either on an existing file or copy it and work on the copy. The second method could be more time consuming but will save you more time when migrating. Keep the history of customization changes in a source control system.
• Never make any changes that could break the backward compatibility of the DB schema, such as changing the column type or renaming a column or a table.
• The Spring XMA configuration files are the core configuration files of Oracle Billing Insight and you must not modify them unless instructed in this document Oracle Billing Insight uses Spring to manage JavaBean creation and transactions, and also for the configuration of Hibernate. The Spring XMA configuration files are stored in the EDX_HOME/xma directory. Possible reasons to customize these files include:
  • To enable Hibernate show_sql.
  • To extend Hierarchy Management, such as adding a new link target type, reimplementing a hierarchy search interface such as IAssignedObjectProvider, inserting a new loader into the OLTPProductionLoader job, configuring a new event handler to handle hierarchy events, or configuring the hierarchy UI behavior. For more information about extending Hierarchy, see Hierarchy Developer's Guide for Oracle Billing Insight.
  • To configure batch report jobs, to send email, for example.