Apps To Fusion

The attachment functionality via personalization has got two limitations. The first limitation has a workaround and second limitation has some proper solution. What are these limitations and how can we overcome those? We will discuss those in this article. The first limitation is that you can specify only one primary key when defining attachments via personalization. For example if you wish to capture attachments against a combination of PO Header Id and PO Line Number, then in such a case you will not be able to implement this requirement via personalization. It must be noted that this is just an example, because in real life you would rather use po_line_id as the primary key. But in some project cases we do need composite primary key to identify the attachments. The second limitation is that the view object attribute that is used as a primary key of attachment must have a value populated in it, otherwise you cannot upload the attachments. It sounds obvious that you need a primary key value to attach documents against it. This is logical because you must have the transaction_id in place before you can load attachments against that transaction. However in reality, most of the screens generate the primary key just prior to the commit taking place, which means attachments can not be uploaded until after the save/apply button has been clicked by the user.

In this article we will discuss the possible solutions for both these limitations

When you create a new item using personalization, at the time of creating primary keys, you will notice that personalization framework does not allow more than one primary key. This is shown in the image below. 

However, using jDeveloper, you can create a combination of 5 columns/attributes as a primary key.

 

 

In order to overcome this you have two options

Extend the controller and get a handle to the attachment bean. Programmatically create instances of primary key bean and attach to the attachment bean. This can be done by extending the controller.

Create a stacklayout region in JDeveloper to create attachment item with multiple primary keys. Once this stacklayout has been developed, upload this region to MDS and embed the same into standard page. You 

can use this article to see how custom regions can be embedded within the standard regions.

http://apps2fusion.com/apps/oa-framework/151-oa-framework-screen-extension-by-embedding-a-custom-page

In most cases, the primary key is generated "just prior" to the data being inserted into the tables. For example, if you are creating an employee record and if your business requirement is to allow users to 

upload documents when creating employee record, then such requirement is not feasible if employee_id gets generated after the user has applied the data in the screen. Of course some pages might be designed 

so as to generate the primary keys for the record at the time of data entry itself.