Understanding Change Impact Analyzer

Change Impact Analyzer is a tool installed separately from PeopleSoft PeopleTools that helps you determine the impact of specific changes you plan to make during an application upgrade. It's an interactive program where you can see the relationships of PeopleSoft definitions in a hierarchical view.

Change Impact Analyzer displays several views of analyses in tabular and text views. It's delivered with a set of rules that are used to determine the relationships between definitions. Typically, these rules are written in SQL.

Note:

Change Impact Analyzer includes some rules written in Java, however, the interface to write custom Java rules is not generally available.

You can add custom rules to the rules files, if needed, to assess the impact of additional relationships.

Rules define the impact or effect on definition(s) when another definition changes. For example, if a database field changes, it would impact the record containing that field.

Oracle provides three rule sets, which are related groups of rules, in Change Impact Analyzer. The rule sets are:

• Basic Impact Analysis, which includes the most frequently used rules.

• Impact Analysis, which includes more rules for more in-depth analysis.

• References Only, which includes all rules.

See Working with Rules Files.

You can add or remove rules from these rule sets, or you can create new rule sets.