Programmatic Extensibility of RPASCE Through Innovation Workbench

Innovation Workbench is the first choice for programmatic extensibility of RAP applications.

This section describes how Innovation Workbench (IW) can be used to extend RPASCE.

IW provides the ability for customers to upload and use custom PL/SQL functions and procedures within the RPASCE framework. These customer-supplied PL/SQL functions and procedures will, by default, have read access to all the metadata tables and fact data that is present across different RPASCE applications within PDS, such as MFP, IPOCS-Demand Forecasting, AP, and so on.

Facts that are marked as customer-managed in the application configuration will additionally have write access and can be modified by the customer-supplied code. The ability to change fact data is a deliberate opt-in, as any data modification made by the custom PL/SQL must conform to the RPASCE norms to be successful.

RPASCE provides a helper PL/SQL package: rp_g_rpas_helper_pkg. This is the package that the custom PL/SQL functions and procedures should use. These will help simplify commonly used tasks, such as looking up the fact table name for a fact or finding the NA value of a FACT.

Finally, the applications will be able to invoke the custom PL/SQL functions and procedures from within the RPASCE rules and expressions framework using the new special expression execplsql.