Overview of Loading Date-Effective Objects
Many Oracle HCM Cloud objects are date-effective. That is, they retain a history of changes, each of which has effective start and end dates. Professional users can retrieve and edit the version of an object as of a specified date.
You can load date-effective objects and their date-effective history using HCM Data Loader. This topic provides some general rules about loading date-effective objects.
Attributes of Date-Effective Records
This table introduces the attributes that occur in date-effective records.
|
Attribute |
Description |
|---|---|
|
EffectiveStartDate |
The start date for the attribute values. This value is required for all date-effective records. |
|
EffectiveEndDate |
The end date for the attribute values. If you leave this value blank, then the date-effective record continues by default to the end of time. |
|
EffectiveSequence |
When multiple changes per day occur, this attribute identifies their order. |
|
EffectiveLatestChange |
For objects with multiple changes per day, this attribute identifies the latest record for the effective start date. |
Supplying Date-Effective History
You can decide how much history to load for new objects, but the history that you provide must be complete and valid. Although you can supply date-effective records in any order in the .dat file, no break in the dates can occur. When you create a date-effective object, only the first date-effective record is processed as a new record. Later-dated records are updates to the first record. To retain values from the previous date-effective record, you can either leave those attribute values blank or repeat the value that's to continue.
Key Values
HCM Data Loader groups records into logical objects, where a logical object is one occurrence of the business object, such as a Worker. The records belonging to a logical object are identified by the unique key for the component. Therefore, the key value must be the same throughout the date-effective history. You can use any of the four key types.
Creating Date-Effective Objects
When you create business objects containing date-effective components using HCM Data Loader:
-
Include the
SET PURGE_FUTURE_CHANGES Yinstruction at the start of the data file. This instruction sets the HCM Data Loader date-effective maintenance mode to Replace. In this mode, which is the default, the contents of the data file replace any existing data. -
If you're including object history, then supply the #NULL token for all attributes that must have null values.
Updating Date-Effective Objects
When you load updates to objects that contain date-effective components:
-
Include the
SET PURGE_FUTURE_CHANGES Ninstruction at the start of the data file. This instruction sets the HCM Data Loader date-effective maintenance mode to Retain. In this mode, existing future-dated changes are retained. If you don't include this instruction, then any existing future-dated changes for the date range of your updates are purged. -
Always supply the effective start date of each change. The effective end date is optional. However, you must set the effective end date to #RETAIN if you don't want to correct any future-dated records. Leave the effective end date null if you want a change to apply until the end of time.