Understanding Property Site Acquisition Setup

Supplemental data is valuable when you want to capture information about a subset of object instances with fields that are relevant only to these particular object instances. Objects include records, pages, and components, which you must configure specifically to accept supplemental data. Supplemental data may be in a field that is embedded in the page or appears on a secondary page. Oracle defines and registers both the supplemental data store records associated with a base record and the components to be used for supplemental data. Be aware that adding any additional objects is regarded as a customization and requires familiarity with PeopleTools.

When you set up supplemental data, you define records and fields and map them to a data storage record. These definitions are not stored in the PeopleTools metadata tables but in the metadata tables for the supplemental data. You define supplemental data page elements to appear on the page in two columns. You must also group supplemental data fields within a display group for display purposes. You assign display groups to pages that are enabled for supplemental data. Once you have made this designation, you can define the conditions under which the application should use the supplemental data. You can perform a search on one display group. The pages within the Supplemental Data component enable you to accomplish these tasks.

Considerations and Limitations

The decision to add supplemental data to your application should be based on how applicable the data objects are to instances of the object. If the data objects apply to a significant number of instances of the object, then it may want to add a field to the table using Application Designer instead of using attributes to capture the data. If the data elements apply to a much smaller percentage of the objects, then attributes may be the solution. While supplemental data provides a large amount of flexibility in terms of adding data elements without changing the underlying data model, you should consider the following limitations when you are evaluating whether to implement supplemental data:

  • Supplemental data does not fall under the normal upgrade capabilities that are provided with PeopleTools.

    Because supplemental data records are not a type of PeopleTools object, you cannot use the standard upgrade facilities that are provided by PeopleTools, such as the Upgrade Copy or Upgrade Compare process, to upgrade supplemental data from one database to another. The mechanism for migrating supplemental data is to extract the data from the source database and move the data to the target database, which you can accomplish, for example, by using Data Mover or a similar tool. Oracle does not deliver any utilities, such as data mover scripts, for migrating sample supplemental data.

  • Because supplemental data records are stored in separate tables (distinct from the base table), incorporating supplemental information into reports may be difficult.

  • Supplemental data can be displayed only in a two-column format.

  • Performance issues can occur if you have too many supplemental data records in the system.

    Use supplemental data only if the data elements are truly dynamic in nature or if they apply to certain instances of an object. Never use supplemental data simply because creating it is easier than using standard PeopleTools fields.