If you've worked with Oracle Tutor, you know that you can enhance the content by adding attachments within Tutor processes, sub-processes and procedures.  To enhance the experience for the end-user, links can be created to learning content created using the User Productivity Kit (UPK).  Linking UPK content within Tutor procedures allows the end-user to review the business process from a high level down to the precise system steps.

For example, within a Tutor procedure, decide where the user touches the system and would benefit by viewing a UPK topic simulating the system steps.  Add a refer to statement to link to the UPK topic playback mode(s) of your choice.  Once you add the link and convert the Tutor documents to HTML, the end-user has the ability to launch the simulation.

Below are three screenshots to show the end to end process. 

1.  The Tutor procedure flow where the end-user has the ability to click on the Update Personal Information image to;

2.  access the refer to statement within the procedure where two playback modes to a UPK topic are linked; and after selecting a playback mode (in this example Try It)

3.  to the UPK Try It mode of that topic.

When editing UPK content, keep in mind the different playback modes.  Depending on the modes being published, you must edit bubble properties to display appropriate instructions in each mode. 

In Do It mode, text needs to be specific to the step, but general enough for a person to be able to follow the instructions and complete the task using their specific, real data. 

When users select a gender from a drop down list or LOV, they may choose from one or more options.  In Try It mode, users might select the "Male" value to complete the simulation, but in real-life (using Do It mode), they may not select "Male", so we instruct users to select the appropriate gender instead.

Next time, I'll cover Know It mode, in the meantime, Happy UPK'ing!

A user simply inputs the desired date and hits the "Go" button.  The accrual is calculated as of the date entered.  This is useful for both employees and managers wishing to view accrual balances on a given date.

This new functionality appears to work well within the current plan year.  Curious to see what would happen if I entered a date in the next year, I tried 01-Jan-2010.  I immediately received an error indicating a problem with a user defined function in the accrual formula "PTO_PAYROLL_CALCULATION". We'll have to take a closer look at this to see what is happening.  I would fully expect someone to try a date far into the future, so we'll need a more graceful ending than a framework error page.

Even with that small issue, the new Entitlement Balances functionality looks like a useful addition to both Employee and Manager Self Service.

While validating few of our self service customisations after the R12.1 upgrade, we encountered a runtime error, java.lang.IllegalAccessError: tried to access class oracle.jdbc.driver.OraclePreparedStatement from class... 

On little Googling and surfing around Metalink, we landed on Metalink note 335754.1 which stated the reason quite clearly.

"The Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2) will be the last major release to offer the following feature/libraries: classes12.jar, oracle.jdbc.drivers.* and OracleConnectionCacheImpl. In other words these features/libraries will not be available in the next major database release"

With an upgrade to R12.1 tech stack, which includes Oracle Database 11.1.0.7 and JDK6, this was bound to happen.

The best fix to the issue at hand was to edit>recompile>deploy the Java source files after removing/altering the desupported JDBC code. And so we did!

For instance, the following import statement,
import oracle.jdbc.driver.*;

was replaced by 

import oracle.jdbc.*;