Business Definitions

An integral part of the payroll setup is defining payroll business definitions.

Use the Define Payroll Business Definitions task in the Define Payroll tasks list to create lookups, value sets, and descriptive flexfields that you need to support payroll.

Lookups

Lookups are lists of values in the application that provide validations or provide a list of values for a user input field in the user interface. You define a list of values as a lookup type consisting of a set of lookup codes, each code's translated meaning, and optionally a tag. The tags control which countries can have access to the lookup codes being defined. End users see the list of translated meanings as the available values for an object.

Let's look at an example of a lookup type for marital status (MAR_STATUS) that has lookup codes for users to specify the marital status as given below in this table.

Lookup Code	Meaning	Tag
M	Married	Not applicable
S	Single	Not applicable
R	Registered Partner	+NL
DP	Domestic Partner	-FR, AU

As you manage lookups, consider these.

• Using lookups in applications

• Configurable levels

• Accessing lookups

• Enabling lookups

• The three kinds of lookups: standard, common, and set enabled

Descriptive Flexfields

Use descriptive flexfields to add customer-defined attributes to business object entities, and define validation for them.

All the business object entities that you can use in the application are enabled for descriptive flexfields. However, configuring descriptive flexfields is an optional task.

Configuring descriptive flexfields involves managing the available flexfields registered with your Oracle Applications Cloud database and configuring their flexfield-level properties, defining and managing descriptive flexfield contexts, and configuring global and context-sensitive segments.

Extensible Flexfields

Extensible flexfields are like descriptive flexfields, with some additional features.

Unlike descriptive flexfields, the columns corresponding to extensible flexfield segments are part of specific tables, separate from the base application table. Unlike descriptive flexfield contexts, the set of attributes in an extensible flexfield context remains constant and doesn't differ by context value.

An extensible flexfield describes an application entity, with the run time ability to expand the database that implementation consultants can use to define the data structure that appears in the application.

Extensible flexfields support one-to-many relationships between the entity and the modified attribute rows.

To get a list of predefined extensible flexfields, open the Setup and Maintenance area, and use the Extensible Flexfields for Payroll task.

Here are a few aspects that are important in understanding extensible flexfields:

• Usages

• Categories

• Pages

• Security

• Protected Extensible Flexfield Data

Value Sets

A value set is a group of valid values that you assign to a flexfield segment to control the values that are stored for business object attributes.

An end user enters a value for an attribute of a business object while using the application. The flexfield validates the value against the set of valid values that you configured as a value set and assigned to the segment.

For example, you can define a required format, such as a five digit number, or a list of valid values, such as green, red, and blue.