Alternative Usage of Work Areas

Oracle LSH was designed to allow multiple Definers to work in a single Work Area that contains an entire logical application, using the Partial installation mode to install their own work.

However, it is possible to use different Work Areas for different portions of the business application. For example, you can create a separate Work Area for each Definer. If you create multiple Work Areas for different portions of the application, we recommend that you also maintain a primary Work Area to contain the entire application to validate and clone as a whole. Definers can then develop new object instances and definitions in their own Work Areas and move the instances into the main Work Area when they are ready.

This approach has the following advantages:

• You can develop and validate different parts of the business application at different times. For example, if the business purpose of the Application Area is to analyze all the data for a particular study, you might need to develop and validate adverse events reports before efficacy reports for the study.
• Definers can install their Work Area at any time, never having to wait for another Definer's partial installation to complete. However, installation should not be a lengthy process. This issue is primarily of concern for large groups of Definers working on the same business application.

  Note:

  You can remove the individual Definers' Work Areas after you have copied their object instances into the main Work Area. Unused object instances are eliminated, making more space available. However, object instances do not require very much space.

  You can remove only Work Areas whose Usage Intent is Development, or Work Areas whose Usage Intent is Quality Control or Production but which do not contain any installed objects.

The approach has the following disadvantages:

• When Definers move objects from one Work Area to another they may need to remap Table instances to executables. If they copy and paste mapped executable instances and Table instance together, Oracle LSH maintains the mapping.

  Because only one executable can write to any given Table instance, normally target mappings would be in the Definer's Work Area and Oracle LSH would maintain the mapping if the Definer moves the two object instances together. However, source Tables would often not be located in an individual Definer's Work Area, so the Definer would need to remap to source Table instances and test the new mappings. Also, if a Definer copies the object instances instead of moving them, he or she must redo all the mapping.

• Definers should retest object instances after pasting them to the main Work Area.
• If Definers have used the same name for the same type of object instance in two separate Work Areas, one of them must be renamed when they are pasted into the same Work Area. Oracle LSH renames them automatically by appending an underscore and the number one (_1), or the next higher number, to the name.