The Oracle calendar creation form exists throughout the system: General Ledger, Receivables, Purchasing, OPM, etc., all have at least one calendar form. And of course, with different Oracle development teams creating these forms, they can and often do function in entirely different ways.
One example: unlike the GL calendar, the OPM Financial Calendar new creation line starts at the end of all the months previously created. The form does not auto-query, and does not take the cursor to the next new row. As a result, our client, who was very familiar with the General Ledger version of the calendar form, unknowingly created an issue with the OPM calendar.
The user did not query the existing periods in the calendar to start with, or go to the end of the list of existing periods, therefore the period was created with a range of 01-JAN-2005 through 31-JAN-2016. You might think this isn’t necessarily a big deal, but for processing, it’s huge. Oracle not only validates the records in the date range, it also validates all ranges of the calendar. Even though the test records were all prior to 01-JAN-2016, it didn’t matter. We could not execute any jobs because of “duplicate date range”. The 01-JAN-2005-start date included every record ever created.
Fortunately, this situation can be corrected. You could delete the errant period created, using the delete icon in the upper menu; but if you have SQL access, or a good developer (which the client did in this case), just update the beginning date. As long as no transactions occurred in this newly created period, an SQL update of the beginning date shouldn’t cause any testing issues.
It’s important to know exactly where you are in the forms, and to check out your value or range before you save. I’m a little old fashioned, but I think making sure I’m actually at the last record in the form by using the menu tool (N > View > Record > Last) is always a good idea.
Do you have a question or challenge? Please feel free to contact us here at OnPlan Consulting. We would be happy to discuss your upgrade, Oracle apps, or business process solutions with you.
