1. Administering and Working with Oracle Enterprise Data Management Cloud
  2. Administration
  3. Working with Applications
  4. Understanding Blockout Periods

Understanding Blockout Periods

Blockout periods can be set up on applications or dimensions to enable Owners or Metadata Managers to establish a date range during which requests, imports, and viewpoint loads are held and not applied to the active view until the blockout period has ended.

For example, you may not want changes to be made to data during a financial close, a system reconciliation, or a data migration.

During the blockout period, requests can still be created and submitted, and the requests continue to follow the approval and commit policy workflow. However, after all of the approval and commit policies are fulfilled, the request is held in a "blocked" state until the blockout period is over. When the blockout period ends (either because the blockout period end date was reached or because an owner disabled the blockout period manually), all blocked requests are validated and either completed and closed if there are no issues or returned to the workflow if there are validation issues.

Considerations

  • You can configure blockout periods on applications and dimensions. By default, the dimension blockout settings are the same as the application blockout settings, but you can override the application settings with dimension blockout settings. See Application and Dimension Blockout Settings.
  • You configure the blockout period from the application or dimension inspector. You can set the blockout for a specified time period only or a recurring time period. For recurring time periods, you can base the period on a Gregorian period or a fiscal period. See Configuring Blockout Periods.
  • By default, the blockout applies to request items for all bound or partially bound data chain objects. You can configure the blockout period to apply to unbound data chain objects as well.
  • You can specify that requests submitted by users with Owner or Data Manager permission on the application or dimension are exempt from the blockout period and are completed normally.
  • For requests that contain request items from different applications or dimensions, if any application or dimension in the request is currently in a blockout period the entire request is blocked. All changes from all request items are applied after the blockout period has ended for all associated applications or dimensions.

While the blockout period is active:

  • You cannot perform any workflow actions on blocked requests (for example, recall, withdraw approval, or push back). However, you can still add comments or attachments to the request.
  • You cannot run imports or viewpoint loads on any blocked dimensions, unless the Allow Exceptions setting on the affecting blockout (application or dimension) allows you to.
  • You cannot bind a different viewpoint to a dimension in the blocked application.

When the blockout period is over:

  • Requests are validated. If there are no errors, the requests are completed. Multiple blocked requests for the same application are completed in the order that their workflow ended and they entered Blocked status.
  • If there are validation errors, the request status is changed from Blocked to its previous stage before the blockout (Draft or In Flight), and the submitter is notified.

Note:

When a blockout period has ended (because the blockout period end date was reached or because an owner disabled the blockout period manually), it may take up to five minutes for the blockout status to be updated and any blocked requests to be processed.