E-Sourcing Page Customizations
Hi All - I apologize that I missed my posting last week. I am doing my best to write weekly, but it is not always so easy.
In the past couple of weeks, I have spoken to some people about the E-Sourcing / CLM Page Customization feature. This feature allows you to make configurations to the user interface in E-Sourcing without changing code. The types of configurations include: hiding fields, making fields required, changing the labels on fields, positioning fields on a page, and making fields not editable.
Page customizations are setup for a business object class or master data class. That is, each of the major business objects (Projects, RFx, Auctions, Master Agreements, etc) in E-Sourcing / CLM will have one page customization object. Each page customization object will consist of overrides that indicate the individual field configurations. For example, to make the Description field required in the Projects module, there will be a single override that specifies the field DOCUMENT_DESCRIPTION will have its required property set to a value of yes.
Each override in the page customization object will specify a single property for the field, so there could be many overrides for a single field. Unfortunately, the system does not perform many validations when the overrides are setup, so the specification of the field id must be done correctly; additionally, the system allow the same override to be specified for the same field multiple times. At run-time, however, the first one in the list of the overrides is the one that will be applied.
When page customization overrides are used as described above, they will apply to all instances of the business object class (e.g., all projects in the system would have the description being required). In many cases, however, there are requirements to conditionally implement page customization overrides. That is, the requirement might be that the description should only be required when the project is a specific type.
Conditional page customization overrides are available in E-Sourcing / CLM through additional fields on the page customization override. The fields are referred to as the dimension fields and they logically work as follows:
If the dimension field specified has the value as specified in the dimension field value then apply the override, otherwise, the override is ignored.
Following through with the example described above, if the description should only be required for Projects of a specific type (e.g., Category Project), then the dimension fields would be set as follows:
Dimension Field: DOC_TYPE
Dimension Field Type: Project Type
DImension Field Value: Category Project
Page customization overrides that are implemented with dimensions provide a lot of configurability in E-Sourcing and CLM. There are two important considerations that must be taken into account when implementing overrides using dimensions. The first consideration is that page customization overrides are applied when a document is entered and not applied again until the document is re-entered. This means that clicking save on the document will not re-apply the page customizations. I point this out because a common question I have heard is: could the page customization override dimension field be a value list value field and when the user changes the value in the drop down, could another field be hidden or made required. Unfortunately, this will not work well because changing the value list value will not refresh the page customization overrides. The second consideration is in the way the system process page customization overrides. They are processed in the order that the exist in the page customization object and as soon as an override is “found” for a particular field and property, it is applied. This means that the dimension field overrides must precede the non-dimensioned overrides so that they will be applied correctly.
An exmple of the above may be necessary to ensure it is clear. Suppose that the system has ten Project Types configured and there is an extension field named IT Project Type that only applies to projects that are of type IT Project. The requirement might be that the extension field should only be visible on the IT Project Types. This would be accomplished with two page customization overrides on the Project module: the first override would indicate that the IT Project Type field has the hidden property set to no when dimension field DOC_TYPE is set to IT Project Type. The second override would indicate that the IT Project Type field has the hidden property set to yes (no dimensions are required here). These two overrides would implement the requirement stated above.
As I mentioned above, page customizations are a very nice feature of E-Sourcing / CLM. They provide for a lot of powerful configurations to be made, yet require careful setup to ensure proper operation.
In a future posting, I will describe how scripting and hidden extension fields can help you do even more with page customizations.
Good luck!