Considerations for Creating Contexts

Whether to Create One or Two Contexts

Determine whether the common terms for the two contexts should be registered as the same term objects or as different term objects. When common terms have the same meaning, the most economical practice is to reuse the common term definitions for both contexts.

Create two contexts if:

• The components have actionable fields that they do not share in common.

• One or the other of the components needs significant customization.

Considerations for Exposing Component Buffer Fields as Terms

Carefully consider which component buffer fields are to be made available as terms.

• Remember the big picture—select terms that can be reused at some point.

  However, you do not want to expose every component field as a term. Some of the transactional components that enable users to perform complex tasks may have component fields that are used as work fields to implement the component, but which do not represent functional data. Exposing these fields as terms could overpopulate the data library.

• Oracle recommends that you expose terms of those data elements on the component that are displayed to the end user and the elements that make up the component’s search keys.

• Work-fields may contain valuable data and may be exposed as terms, but if these fields have not yet been populated by the time that the values from the corresponding terms are requested, unpredictable results may occur. If you know for certain that the work-fields will contain data at the appropriate times, such as in the example of a work-field for which data is computed as part of component prebuild, then exposing the data element as a term is not harmful. Although a Manage Context component is available for adding terms to a context, configuring terms is easier in the Generate Context component.

Considerations for Naming Terms

Note the following guidelines when you name terms:

• The framework prefixes each alias with the name of the context to reduce the creation of duplicate names.

• In record and rowset objects, the default term name is the name of the page buffer scroll, which will not be meaningful for the end user.

  Oracle recommends this name be changed to something that is meaningful for the user.

• Generally, rowset object names should be plural and record object term names should be singular.

  For example, if a component's scroll-level 1 contained purchase order line items, the rowset object is named Detail Items and the record object is named Line Item.

• If any terms are filed under alternate subject areas and you want your alternate heading to override, use the Overridden Subject Area prompt.

  Oracle recommends that you carefully consider whether all the names generated are meaningful before importing the context. Whenever context terms have the same functional meaning, have the context refer to preexisting terms rather than creating new ones.