Descriptive Flexfields in Oracle apps

Descriptive flexfields allows you to add additional fields to the form so that additional information can be captured which otherwise is not provided in the existing form.A descriptive flexfield appears on a form as a field enclosed in Square Brackets [ ]. A descriptive flexfield can have fields and segments which has a prompt and can have a set of valid values. Again segment can be global or context sensitive. Global segment always appears in the flexfield pop-up window and context-sensitive segment depend on the information present in the form.

We will try to work with Order Management Super user and try to add some DFF to it.

Navigate

Order Management Super User, Vision Operations (USA) responsibility

Order,Returns-->Sales Orders



At this point of time if you will click on the DFF provided it will not come up with any forms as mine is a default installation and there is no customization done.



Now once you have this page open

Go to Help-->Diagnostics-->Examine

and pass following information

Block:-$DESCRIPTIVE_FLEXFIELD$
Field:- ORDER.DF

Once you have passed these two information just press tab and you will find the Value field automatically populated with this value

Additional Header Information (Order Management)



Now we will try to enable this by adding some segments to it.

Navigate Application Developer-->Flexfield -->Descriptive-->Segments



IN the descriptive Felxfield Segment page.

Press F11 and enter following

Title :=Additional Header Information

Application:=Order Management

you will get the following




Deselect the Freeze Flexfield Definition so that you can make the changes to your segments.



Once you will deselect some fields will appear in yellow. Now select the Global Data elements and click on Segments , now in the new pop up add two elements and save the changes.




Go to the main page and select Required

Then select the Freeze Flexfield Definition.

Once it is saved click on compile to update the form.



Validate if the code is compiled successfully.



Now go back to order Management responsibility and open Sales order this time once you will click on the DFF field you will get the following pop up window.




You might observer that it is additonally displaying a context Value in the DFF which have not added , this comes as we have registered our DFF wit CONTEXT as the Structure column.

In order to validate the same.

Naviagte

Application Developer-->Flexfield-->Descriptive-->Register






click on register and you will get the page where you can see Context has been used as a structure column and the context prompt is set as Context Value.



You can further click on the columns section to validate what all columns are registered in the DFF and you can use the same to be displayed




Context is a field created in the descriptive flexfield structure and is used to allow the user to manually select different contexts.

Now if you want to not display the Context, go back to your Segments page and unfreeze it first and then deselect the Required and Displayed button.


Once it is deselected once again freeze the flexfield definition and compile the changes.



Once changes are done go back to order management and now check the DFF you will be seeing only the two fields which we have defined