EBS Integration Repository and eTRM

As a lot of companies and users shift their focus towards the Cloud Products, sometimes it's easy to forget that an enormous number of customer still utilize EBS and will continue to do so for years to come. As such, those customers will continue to integrate their EBS environments with other systems, like early payment engines, OCR engines, tax engines, third party SCM systems, other ERP's and more. The following two resources are extremely powerful when planning integration work for EBS, and I have leveraged them countless times.

First, I wanted to remind everyone that the Integration Repository responsibility in EBS is a great resource to see whether there is already an Oracle API to accomplish a specific task. Please make use of it when building solutions to address customer needs or if you have doubts in regards to whether the vendor you are working with for your project, or your own development team, is building a custom function for an existing standard function or procedure, as you always want to leverage seeded functionality that will be supported by Oracle and doesn't break when upgrades happen.

For those that are not familiar with the Integration Repository, you simply need to add it as a responsibility under your user and browse the different modules to drill down to the specific service interface you want to look at. Once you drill into a specific API, you will see a list of the details including function names, parameters, rules, and much more.

Browsing the repository:

• I am showing Projects related API's in the screenshot.

Additionally, remember the Oracle eBusiness Suite Electronic Technical Reference Manual (eTRM), is also available to us with our Oracle Support accounts.

This one is especially useful to see EBS database design and dependency information, you can also browse the FND model and the Data Dictionary with it! This is an extremely powerful tool to see what happens to those database objects that you rely on when upgrades occur, as those changes will likely impact your custom concurrent programs, reports, alerts, and other extensions.

Link: http://etrm.oracle.com

EBS Seeded Comparison Reports

Hello everyone, I haven’t written about EBS in a while since I’ve been focused on the Cloud products, but I wanted to bring to your attention the below seeded reports provided by Oracle which can be used to compare environments with different patch sets, to better assess the impact of applying those patches/upgrades and see differences at a low level. This is as relevant as ever since EBS patching hasn’t slowed down, and many new features continue to come in.

Below are descriptions of each report with the respective Oracle notes with all the relevant information. Most of the content and report description come straight from Oracle Support, the idea is to consolidate them here for your awareness.

They are all very useful, and one of them specially is of interest to me and I have used it extensively in order to compare different ATG versions to assess impact and help build a test plan. The ATG patch family is important because EBS continues to enhance through different avenues like enhanced Mobile support and the Enterprise Command Centers, and these rely heavily on your ATG readiness.

The EBS File Comparison Report provides a comprehensive comparison of file system artifacts between different Oracle E-Business Suite releases for important file types. As part of Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade planning, this report can assist customers to get a clear idea of "what is different in a new release" (additions, removals and modifications for Oracle E-Business Suite delivered files).

The report also covers some special artifacts that span the file system and database (for example, Oracle E-Business Suite delivered Oracle Application Framework (OAF) personalizations, Oracle Application Framework (OAF) based pages, Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher reports and so on).The EBS File Comparison Report is intended to complement other already available reports such as EBS Data Model Comparison report and EBS ATG Seed Data Comparison report.

The EBS data model comparison report provides the static database object definition changes between two EBS releases to help users to preview the database object definition changes before upgrading their instances from one release to another and understand the impact of the database object changes that may affect the customization or business flows. Users can select a product and navigate the database object definition differences for each supported database object type.

The EBS ATG Seed Data Comparison Report provides a static delta between different EBS releases by documenting the seed data changes delivered by the product data loader files (.ldt extension) based on EBS ATG loader control (.lct extension) files.

The below Oracle Notes cover how to install and navigate the reports. All of these Oracle docs continue to get updated as releases occur and support up to 12.2.9 has been delivered for each of the below:

o EBS Data Model Comparison Report Overview (Doc ID 1290886.1)
o EBS File Comparison Report [VIDEO] (Doc ID 1446430.1)
o EBS ATG Seed Data Comparison Report (Doc ID 1327399.1)

E-Business Suite Support Analyzer Bundle Menu Tool and Automatically Updating Analyzers

If you support Oracle EBS R12 then you are familiar with the Oracle Analyzers. They are essentially reports that were designed by Oracle Support to assist with diagnosing issues by providing detailed analysis and even some potential solutions, like applying a relevant generic data fix or suggesting a patch. These analyzers can also speed up your response time when creating an SR by providing the outputs for the relevant analyzers in a product family when you initiate the SR.

The issue with the Analyzers is that there are a lot of them, and maintaining them can become difficult. This is because Analyzers are basically scripts that can be ran manually by your DBA or can be setup to run as a concurrent program (not all Analyzers allow for this). What this means is that it's time consuming to install analyzers and configure them to be ran as concurrent programs and then keeping them up to date, as Oracle releases new versions of the packages behind said Analyzers rather often.

Here is where the Bundle Analyzer tool comes into play. It makes it easy to install all the available Analyzers from a menu that can be easily navigated and utilized by a System Administrator or DBA. You can also quickly load and register analyzers as concurrent programs and also have the ability to uninstall them. Basically, the tool provides a simple interface that makes it really easy to perform these tasks.

You also don't need to worry about data integrity, per Oracle, "Application data is not altered in any way when the Analyzer Bundle Menu is installed or when any Support Analyzer is run."

What this allows you to do, as a support team, is quickly spinning up the analyzers you want to use and update them on a regular basis, maybe when you do your releases, or anytime you wish and as time allows. One of the features of the tool is that you can bulk load all analyzers in a given EBS product family or even all analyzers in all families, as well as individual analyzers, if you don't want to complicate matters by having unnecessary capabilities.

The installation steps are very simple for any DBA or System Administrator, and all the steps are outlined in the below note provided by Oracle:

E-Business Suite Support Analyzer Bundle Menu Tool (Doc ID 1939637.1)

Now, while the Bundle tool greatly simplifies this effort of obtaining analyzers and updating them, there’s still manual work involved, and many of us have asked whether there's some way to automate this further.

In response, Oracle has now released a new feature allowing concurrent programs to be scheduled to address updating analyzers using the bundle tool. This can allow you to automate updating your existing analyzers on a regular basis without human intervention.

All the details in regards to this valuable enhancement to the Analyzer Bundle tool can be seen in the below note provided by Oracle. The note contains all the details around the two concurrent programs involved in the Auto Update feature and how it works.

E-Business Suite Support Analyzer Bundle AutoUpdate Concurrent Program (Doc ID 2377353.1)

This is an extremely powerful tool that can truly enhance your capabilities to support your customers proactively and I urge everyone to explore it.

Regards,

Julio

Oracle Pre-Built Developer Virtual Machines

I wanted to bring to your awareness the Oracle Pre-Built Virtual Machines that are available to us in OTN with our Oracle accounts.

All you need to do is install Oracle Virtual Box (Free Virtual Machine Client), and then import any appliance (Pre-Built VM), that you download from OTN, to it and start using it.

Oracle has several Pre-Built VM’s available at the following location: https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/developer-vm/index.html

The one that’s probably most useful for the typical Oracle (including EBS) development activities is the “Database App Development VM”. This one comes with the below pre-installed:

• Oracle Linux 7
• Oracle Database 12c Release 2 Enterprise Edition (12.2.0.1 Linux x86-64)
• Oracle XML DB
• Oracle SQL Developer
• Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler
• Oracle Application Express
• Hands-On-Labs (accessed via the Toolbar Menu in Firefox)

Note that it includes Oracle Application Express (APEX) so it is a great way to get familiar with that product without having to go through the installation steps or using the Cloud version, where your workspace gets wiped periodically.

Also, this VM, like others, comes with Hands on Labs, where you can learn to use certain software like APEX by following the training included in the VM.

When you launch this particular VM and open the Browser, it takes you to the Learning Center and you can go through the Labs for each of the topics for the given VM,  the Database App Development VM contains the below training material:

This development VM is a really good alternative to install development tools and try things you wouldn’t want to try on your workstation out of fear of messing up your environment, so everyone should install Virtual Box and download this VM!

Other interesting VM's available for download:

• SOA Suite 12.1.3.0.1 VM

• Oracle Data Integrator 12c VM (Comes with Golden Gate)

• Oracle WebCenter Portal VM (Full Webcenter Suite)

Needles to say, the above VM's provide an excellent opportunity to gain exposure and experience with tools like Webcenter and Golden Gate without going through complex installations and having to involve any vendors.

To summarize, the key benefits of utilizing these Virtual Machines include:

• Utilizing new Oracle software without having to perform complex installations or vendor involvement.
• Experimenting without exposing your workstation.
• Free guided training provided by Oracle in the form of Hands On Labs.

Thanks!

The Oracle EBS Invalid Object Utility

If you are familiar with Oracle databases then you are familiar with invalid objects. Specially in the realm of EBS, where making a code change to a package, changing a table or applying a patch can cause many objects to become invalid within the various schemas in your database. There are of course tables you can query to see which objects are invalid, like dba_objects, where you can see whether a particular object is in an invalid state. However, the reason as to why that is, is not as easy to discern.

Here is where the EBS Invalid Object Utility (Doc ID 2214169.1) comes in. According to Oracle, "this utility is provided by Oracle Support to proactively assist you with maintaining Oracle Application environments and can also be used for data collection by Support engineers".

So, what does it do? It generates an HTML output with good details around invalid objects in the target instance and insights as to why they are invalid. If you have ongoing research efforts to reduce the invalid objects within your EBS Oracle database then this is a must, also it is a great a tool going forward whenever you need to research any invalid objects. A good use case would be to run the utility after releases or maintenance activities where patches are applied in order to get information regarding any objects that may have become invalid and why that happened.

Unlike your basic SQL against the tables provided by Oracle, the UI within the report looks great, and aside from aiding the research of invalid objects it has a couple of additional features. First is the "droppable" objects feature, which lists obsolete objects that can be dropped, since many objects don’t get dropped automatically after patches or upgrades, even if they get deprecated, thus creating noise within your instance and making subsequent upgrades harder and true invalid objects difficult to mine. The second additional feature is the patches applied feature, this one is really useful since it helps show which patch caused which object to become invalid, which really narrows down the root cause analysis as to why an object became invalid after a patch was applied.

There is no configuration required, all that is required is for the utility to be unzipped and executed. There are some basic requirements such as having Perl installed and the APPS environment set, all of which can be seen in the note I included above.

Oracle has a dedicated thread to share feedback regarding the utility and ask any questions, the thread can be found at: https://community.oracle.com/docs/DOC-1011252

Happy invalid objects hunting!

Java Web Start for Oracle EBS

Hello Everyone,

I have been exploring options in regards to our dependency on Internet Explorer (slow and clunky) due to the fact that we rely on the Java Plug-in (NPAPI) to launch the EBS Forms, and IE is the last reliable browser to support the Netscape Plug-in Application Programming Interface (NPAPI), which limits our users to only utilize this browser. Additionally, Microsoft continues to slowly but surely phase out IE in favor of Edge.

Those used to be our only problems, Oracle planned to deprecate the Java Plug-in for web browsers starting with the release of Java SE 9 (and they have).

The solution that Oracle is now offering in regards to these problems is Java Web Start. Java Web Start applications can be launched independently of a browser since they do not rely on a browser plug-in, and it provides a migration path from Java applets.

Below is a snippet of the architectural differences between the NPAPI approach and the Java Web Start approach:

The below is a snippet from Oracle in regards to Java Web Start:

What is Java Web Start?

Java Web Start provides a browser-independent architecture for deploying Java 2 technology-based applications to the client desktop. With Java Web Start, users can launch a Java application by clicking a link in a web page. The link points to a Java Network Launch Protocol (JNLP) file, which instructs Java Web Start software to download, cache, and run the application. This way, users can download and launch applications without going through additional installation procedures.

Java Web Start software is installed as part of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) software. Users do not have to install Java Web Start software separately or perform additional tasks to use Java Web Start applications.

What will this help solve?

1. Oracle, and modern browsers, will soon (already have) stop supporting NPAPI and launching Oracle Forms as we do today will not be possible (without major security concerns).
2. Many On-Prem EBS shops have issues today keeping up with JRE versions, and continue to use JRE 6 or 7, due to complexities around signing JAR files and the JRE executable (and compatibility issues with customizations).
3. Internal security guidance at most companies is aggressively moving to being more up to date with JRE versions on workstations, and Java Web Start is less dependent on the JRE and Oracle is working hard on ensuring the latest versions of JRE support Java Web Start.
4. Users can again utilize their preferred browser to navigate Oracle EBS Forms (such as Chrome, Firefox and Edge), and will no longer be limited to Internet Explorer.

In terms of implementation, if you are still on SSL, I believe you should combine these initiatives (Webstart and TLS migration) given you will also need to perform Forms testing when implementing TLS due to certain pre-requisite patches, and some tech-stack prerequisites are shared.

These are not nice to haves, this is the guidance from Oracle in terms of where they are moving with Forms and browser security. I believe the sooner you take these on the better, both of these are recommendations/mandates from Oracle noted in the Quarterly EBS Upgrade Recommendations: July 2018 Edition (and previous editions going back to 2017, however, they weren’t very mature).

I recommend you do a POC of the Java Web Start component by applying the pre-requisite patches in a test environment to test functionality and some key custom forms (which Oracle says should be fully supported by switching from NPAPI to Java Web Start).

Below are some key documents around Java Web Start (which is now fully supported for Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.2 and 12.1):

Using Java Web Start with Oracle E-Business Suite (Doc ID 2188898.1)

https://blogs.oracle.com/stevenchan/java-web-start-now-available-for-ebs-121-and-122

https://blogs.oracle.com/stevenchan/e-business-suite-and-java-web-start%3a-frequently-asked-questions

Thanks,
Julio

SSL to TLS, Oracle EBS 12.2

Hello Everyone,

In reviewing the Quarterly EBS Upgrade Recommendations: July 2018 Edition one of the key recommendations is to migrate from SSL to TLS.

12.2 inbound, outbound, and loopback connections are now (as of Q3 2016) certified with TLS 1.2, 1.1, and 1.0 as noted in the below article:

https://blogs.oracle.com/stevenchan/tls-12-certified-with-e-business-suite-122

The below doc ID contains the instructions for the move:

Enabling TLS in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 (Doc ID 1367293.1)

There is a  workflow patch, in addition to performing the migration work, so there is definitely a lot to do, specially if you are on an older version of the AD & TXK patches and your JDK version is pretty outdated.

The benefits for this are many, including easing the path to making your EBS accessible to external clients and better browser security!

Thanks,

Julio

Collaborate 15 - Thoughts and Tips

Hello Everyone,

     I just got back from Collaborate 15 in Las Vegas, and I must say, this is a must for any OAUG, IOUG or Quest members. Why? Three reasons mainly:

1) The sessions presented by Oracle and third party companies utilizing Oracle technology.
          These can be really good or really bad. The ones presented by Oracle, are usually good and informative. They present new products by Oracle, or have technical sessions regarding current products. The sessions by third parties, these sometimes can be a sales pitch for the respective companies, but some of them provide very technical details and will give you an insight that Oracle will often not give you (why blast their own products).

2) The networking! You get to meet thousands (yes!) of professionals who work in YOUR area and share the same interests. Many of them from different companies all around the world!

3) The exhibit hall! Here you get to demo many third party software that can enhance your Oracle installation or product. You can also demo new products that Oracle has recently released or will release in the near future. It is also a great chance to collect some freebies from the booths and meet interesting people.

Now some tips for the conference:
- Plan out the sessions you will attend early! Utilize the Collaborate App (can be downloaded from the usual outlets). But, go back often because the sessions will sometimes change locations, or sessions can be added or removed. Also, you can utilize the app to download presentation materials, rate the presenters, and network with other attendees.

- Book your hotel early! Specially in Vegas, where the conference will be held for the next two years as well! Hotels get filled and the prices sky rocket, so keep this in mind!

- If you are attending in Vegas, buy a mono rail pass or a bus pass! This way you can move freely around the strip and have some healthy fun after your sessions are over for the day!

- Do not be shy! Talk to people, exchange business cards (yes bring these!), connect with them on LinkedIn, these connections can pay off in many ways.

- Take notes during your sessions!! There is great information buried in even the most boring of presentations, arm yourself with this knowledge and apply it in your work place!

- We all want to walk around the strip and enjoy Vegas, but please visit the exhibit hall! Many of the products showcased can add value to your environments and also you can win some cool prices!

If you are wondering what this conference is and you are an Oracle professional, then you are behind! Look it up and arm youself with this knowledge. If your company is not an OAUG member and utilizes Oracle, then make a case to them to become a member and then make an even stronger case for them to send you to the conference! It is definitely worth it and can add value to any organization.

Please ask away should you have any questions regarding the conference or Collaborate 15.

Thanks,
Julio