Technology Adjacent

The PeopleSoft PUM Image VMs seems to work pretty well once installed.  There is very little maintenance that I have had to perform on these environments and I can always start over by rebuilding the VM if I really break something.  Still, there have been some small issues recently that have required digging into the these environments so here are some notes to help. Database Administration The Oracle Database runs within the same VM and can be accessed using TNS with SQLPlus, SQL Developer, or most other Oracle-compatible tools.  However, I recently needed to make some adjustments to the SYSADM privileges.  For this I needed to connect as SYSDBA. 1. Login to the VM as root   (this account was setup when you installed the image) 2. Switch to the oracle  account.  This is the database owner. su - oracle 3. You then need to know the database name to connect to.  The easiest way is to look for the pmon process.  In the example be...

I have a query I am trying to write against a custom table within PeopleSoft.  This custom table has some character columns that are free form, but in this case storing dates, so the user can type something like "03/14/2017" for March 14, 2017.  The query needs to evaluate these entries as date criteria, determining whether the date in the column is less than the current date. This is a little challenging because the field could be populate or it could be empty, although in PeopleSoft empty actually means a single space character.  We are also assuming that if it is populated it is always in the format MM/DD/YYYY. A couple different approaches are below, but obviously there are huge issues with this type of implementation... what happens is someone enters something that doesn't even look like a date?  Probably an error. At least in my case the data entry is somewhat controlled.  In both examples I do want to return rows where the date column is blank or th...

Personalize links as displayed on a PeopleSoft grid. PeopleSoft provides individual users the ability to customize the display of various pages and grids using the "Personalize" links.  This can be useful for power users who want to streamline their pages and filter out unnecessary details.  It can, however, present some challenges for administrators. While testing a recent PeopleTools and HCM Image update an issue was reported in which three columns of a grid were not displaying.  The component was HRS_JO_360, part of the Recruitment/Talent Acquisition module.  Of the two columns not displaying one was custom and two delivered.  In the place of two of these columns was a checkbox with the column heading "Select". After some troubleshooting we found that the columns displayed correctly for some users, then that all three displayed correctly for a user with the same security roles as the user with the original issue.  We spent some time looking at ot...

A few years ago I read about using Javascript to create "bookmarklets".  These are browser bookmarks that, unlike normal bookmarks, do not point to a specific URL.  They instead contain Javascript and run that script when selected.  This allows you to do a number of interesting things, but one idea I really liked was using them to create universal bookmarks, or cross-environment bookmarks, for PeopleSoft. Basically, once you are logged into a PeopleSoft environment you can use a bookmarklet to transfer you to a specific page within that environment.  This means I can have a single bookmarklet that takes me to a particular page of whatever environment I am in.  So for example, I have one bookmarklet called "Process Monitor".  If I am in FSCM and click that I am taken to Process Monitor for that environment, but if I am in HCM it takes me to that Process Monitor. How Do They Work? As I mentioned, a bookmarklet is just Javascript that does something . ...