Apps To Fusion

In this article you will understand the basic concepts of uploading attachments in Self Service E-Business Suite Application. This article also contains an audio-visual tutorial that explains the steps for incorporating attachments using personalizations in OA Framework.

Using attachment functionality you can upload documents, files etc against any specific transaction in E-Business Suite and thereafter retrieve them at will. For example, lets assume you have a screen for Absence Entry in Self Service HRMS. It is possible that Oracle may not provide an out of the box facility for uploading an attachment against the Absences being created. However given your business requirements, you may want the users to upload medical certificates against the absence entries that are related to health. Using simple personalizations, you can add an attachment section to the Self Service HRMS Absence screen.

Absolutely, all this can be done via a few steps in personalization by a functional person, as will be demonstrated in this article.

Every attachment is stored against a transaction. However the attachments are stored in generic tables like fnd_lobs, fnd_attached_documents etc.

All the attached documents are captured in these generic tables within some tables in FND/APPLSYS schema.

a. Which type of transaction this attachment belogs to. For example, looking at the records in FND Attachment tables, you should know if the attachment belongs to Purchase Order or Sales Order or Customer Record or HRMS Person record or CRM Service request or an Absence entry etc.

b. Next you need to know the transaction id.

For example, if the document was uploaded against a purchase order, then you would like to know the purchase order header id.

Likewise, if the document was uploaded against the Customer Record, then you would like to know the customer_id.

In E-Business Suite, (a) is called Entity, and (b) is called Primary Key/s

If you query the value of column entity_name column in fnd_attached_documents, then you will be able to know the transaction type against which attachment was captured

Similarly, if you query the pk1_value in fnd_attached_documents, then you can find the corresponding customer_id or purchase order header id etc.

In this manner, the relationship between the actual transaction and documents uploaded against the transaction can be figured out.

For example, the below SQL provides you with some insight -

select entity_name, count(*) from fnd_attached_documents group by entity_name order by 2 desc; 

Looking at the results of the above sql, you will notice that most of the attachments exist against purchase orders in vision system.

You will notice that this table has got columns like pk1_value, pk2_value, pk3_value, pk4_value and pk5_value. 

This means that against any given transaction type, you can have a combination of five identifiers to uniquely map an attachment with the E-Business Suite transaction. 

Important-You must view this video in High Definition mode.