Oracle Fusion/Cloud Applications File Based Data Import Templates

When you are the proud owner of a new and shiny instance of Oracle Fusion Applications or Sales Cloud (formerly known as Fusion CRM), one of the first tasks you find yourself at is to load administrative and customer data from various sources.

For cloud instances, there are basically two options of importing (and/or exporting) data:

• File based data import (FBDI)
• Web Services

For mass/bulk data, file based import has many advantages over web services, which are typically chosen for message-based real-time integration with other systems.

In the remainder of this short article, we will focus on FBDI and point out how Oracle assists you with the sometimes tedious task of creating 'the right' import file. For this task, Oracle provides import templates. Let's see where and how we can get them:

My Oracle Support

A logical conclusion is to go to My Oracle Support and search for "fusion import template" (or "cloud import template"). One of the support docs you will then be able to locate easily is 1596128.1 (Oracle Sales Cloud File Import Template (Reference) and SupportingInstructions).

From this MOS document, you can download a generic Sales Cloud template that provides mappings for Sales Accounts, Opportunities, Leads and so forth.

Sales Cloud Import Template for Sales Accounts

In addition, the article contains links to instructions and exercise templates to get you up to speed quickly.

Oracle Enterprise Repository


For non-CRM applications, most of the documents (like Oracle Support Document 1593823.1) on My Oracle Support point to the Fusion Applications Enterprise Repository (OER).

The OER is the one-stop shop for all Fusion Applications related metadata and technical documents (aka 'assets'). Log in as guest to the OER and find file based import related assets by simply typing 'FBDI' in the search box and pressing ENTER.

Search results for FBDI in Oracle Enterprise Repository for Fusion Applications.

Of course you can limit your search results by using other search terms or types.

After selecting the asset of interest in the search results you can download instructions and templates in the Documentation tab.

have a nice day

@lex

Migrating Open UI Configuration to Oracle Sales Cloud - A Test Case

Thanks to Jan Peterson for this article

Oracle Sales Cloud has made some significant progress in the past 18 months and has become a very compelling offering. Alex has posted a summary of the R8 release a while ago. Simplified UI is - in my humbled opinion - the biggest improvement of recent releases. It has been introduced with R7 and significantly improved as part of R8.  As part of the R8 release, the configuration capabilities have been significantly enhanced. As I had a bit of time, I decided to test if more complex Open UI configuration examples can be migrated to Simplified UI. The short answer - at least for the example I picked - is "yes".

I have recently posted an article about arbor, a jQuery plug-in that allows to display complex relationship hierarchies. In the Open UI example we used it to display relationships of a contact. For Simplified UI, I picked opportunities as an example. Below a screenshot of the final outcome that shows a opportunity and its related recurring revenue items, contact and resources:

The configuration framework for Simplified UI in R8 is very powerful. Different options exist to achieve the outcome depicted above. As REST-web service support hasn't made it into  R8 I read Angelo Santagata's blog article with interest. Angelo is a Technology Evangelist working for Oracle. In the article Angelo presents a REST facade for Oracle's Sales Cloud.

I was keen to see how this works and decided to use it for my experiment:

1. I downloaded and installed JDeveloper 11.1.2.4.0 and followed the description in Angelo's article to set up the facade. Angelo recommends to use Oracle Java Cloud - Oracle's Java PaaS service. It seems to be one of the less known facts that Oracle has a comprehensive offering in this space. While the recommendation is definitely correct I decided to use the integrated Weblogic server that comes as part of JDeveloper instead. Apparently this is a valid option for a small test case - for everything beyond a simple test case Java Cloud is the recommended option.
2. Taking the original Open UI PR, removing all Open UI specifics and migrating it to a standalone html page turned out to be surprisingly painless. Plugging in the call to the REST facade and extracting the returned information was also straight forward, especially as JQuery provides easy API's for this use case.The final html-file can be downloaded here
3. I deployed the standalone html page to the local web server that comes with Weblogic following the instructions given here. As the files gets embedded via an iFrame into Sales Cloud and Sales Cloud is using SSL-encryption the web page needs to get exposed via SSL.
4. Eventually the HTML file needed to be embedded in Sales Cloud using the Application Composer. As the HTML page expects the current opportunity as a parameter we have to write a very simple Groovy-statement to pass the id:

Application Composer

Summary

While Sales Cloud doesn't have the depth and breadth of configuration capabilities of Open UI (yet?) it provides comprehensive options to tailor the user experience. As the Open UI capabilities come with some complexity, the Sales Cloud configuration framework is easy to master. In addition, combining Sales Cloud with a Java-based PaaS service - such as Oracle's Java Cloud - opens up a new world of opportunities.

have a nice day

Jan