TCC: Handling Encoding

 

Aahh…multilingual. That word increases the complexity of any project intantly. When your enterprise application is multilingual, it means users will be able to add and edit data in different languages, and that the data can no longer be stored in ASII/ANSI format. East Asian, and Middle Eastern and some European languages require more than one byte for a single charachter, so it has to be stored in Unicode format. While working on Taleo’s TCC scripts, I recently hit a roadblock with multilingual data, but the fantastic folks at Taleo had already solved the problem. © cleartext.blogspot.com 2016

TCC’s pipelines handle data in UTF-8 format, but many enterprise systems will produce output in UTF-16. So which one is better ? There is a common misconception that UTF-8 can not store all language charachters, and that UTF-16 is required. That’s not true. UTF-8 has an amazing awesome format, and it can depict every Unicode charachter, same as UTF-16. Here is a spectucular explanation of this miracle.

So if you get data in UTF-16 (or any of the other formats), how do you load them via TCC ?  In the configuration  file, TCC provides an option to set the encoding of the source file. © cleartext.blogspot.com 2016

If you know the encoding of the source, you enter it here.  This will work for standard Import files. There is also an option to set the response encoding.

But some complicated TCC configurations, like NetChange, require the pipeline data to be in UTF-8. So how do you get around that ?

The encoding can be changed in the configuration file. Go to Pre-Processing tab, and add a new step.

There is an option to add an ‘Convert Encoding’ step. © cleartext.blogspot.com 2016

Choose the source encoding, and set the target as UTF-8. This step has to be the first step in your NetChange configuration file.

Thats it ! cleartext.blogspot.com

Oracle wants 9.3 B from Google

 

This was bound to happen. Again.

Date calculations in eText templates

 

Aahh, eText. That most hated or Oracle templates. One area where this template really falls is in the area of date calculation, or date manipulations. Example a standard requirement is to calculate an end date, or proposed/expected end date for some transaction. Check is valid for only ..30 days from date of issue. cleartext.blogspot.com

The official documentation does no mention any way to x number of days to dates. But if you search on supportweb, you will come across the INCREASE_DATE function.

To add 30 days to today’s date, use INCREASE_DATE(SYSDATE(),30). To substract days, use a negative number for the offset. cleartext.blogspot.com

But that’s it, eText does not provide a way to get the month, year, or day from a date. So those will have to be calculated in whatever onpremise/cloud system is being used and the value must be present in the xml. eText also does not provide a way to add extra functions or XSLT functions in the templates, like in BIP RTF templates. cleartext.blogspot.com

 

 

Originally published on cleartext.blogspot.com

Sequence Numbers in eText templates

 

As I said earlier, Oracle’s eText template is really painful to work with. Its does not have support variables or arrays, so when the need arises to have something temporarily stored somewhere, you are lost. The one thing eText does have, is a method to generate sequence numbers. Basically you use the DEFINE_SEQUENCE command.

The define sequence command has four subcommands: reset at level, increment basis, start at, and maximum. The increment basis subcommand specifies if the sequence should be incremented based on record or extract instances. The allowed parameters for this subcommand are RECORD and LEVEL. Enter RECORD to increment the sequence for every record. Enter LEVEL to increment the sequence for every new instance of a level.  cleartext.blogspot.com

To generate the sequnce numbers, use the SEQUENCE_NUMBER function in the template.

But what if you just want to keep count of something, and not count levels or records in the data ? Just leave out the INCREMENT_BASIS completely.  cleartext.blogspot.com

So now, whenever SEQUENCE_NUMBER function is called, the current value will be printed, and the counter will be increased by 1. This happens everytime the function is invoked.

There are some payment interfaces where the number has to be incremented in steps of 5 or 10. For example, one of the ADP checkprinter format template requires a counter to start at 30, and be incremented in steps of 5. So its 30, 35, 40, 45…

To do that the SEQUENCE_NUMBER function should be used with some mathematics.

 

 

Originally published on cleartext.blogspot.com

.NET : No endpoint element matching this contract could be found in the client element

 

If you are using .NET and trying to integrate to Oracle Fusion Cloud service, any service, HCM,Sales Cloud, Service Cloud.., after consuming the WSDL and writing the first bits of code, you will get to this error:

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Could not find default endpoint element that references contract ….' in the ServiceModel client configuration section. This might be because no configuration file was found for your application, or because no endpoint element matching this contract could be found in the client element.

You will get the error wether you try importing as Web Reference or Service Reference. The reason for this is that even after successfully consuming the WSDL, .NET does not add the end point configuration into the app.config file.

 

1: Possible workaround: When you write the code to create the client object, (SalesCloud account, in my case), instead of going with the default no parameter initialization,  add parameters for Binding and Endpoints.cleartext.blogspot.com

 

VB.NET : Add this code to your project source:

Public Class UsernameTokenOverSslBinding : Inherits CustomBinding
    Public Sub New()
        MyBase.New()
    End Sub
    Public Overrides Function CreateBindingElements() As BindingElementCollection
        Dim bindingElements As BindingElementCollection = New BindingElementCollection
        bindingElements.Add(SecurityBindingElement.CreateUserNameOverTransportBindingElement())cleartext.blogspot.com
        Dim messageEncoding As MtomMessageEncodingBindingElement = New MtomMessageEncodingBindingElement
        messageEncoding.MessageVersion = MessageVersion.Soap11
        bindingElements.Add(messageEncoding)
        Dim transport As HttpsTransportBindingElement = New HttpsTransportBindingElement
        bindingElements.Add(transport)

        Return bindingElements.Clone()
    End Function
End Class

 

C# .NET: Add this code

 

 public class UsernameTokenOverSslBinding : CustomBinding     {         public override BindingElementCollection CreateBindingElements()         {
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            BindingElementCollection bindingElements = new BindingElementCollection();             bindingElements.Add(SecurityBindingElement.CreateUserNameOverTransportBindingElement());             MtomMessageEncodingBindingElement messageEncoding = new MtomMessageEncodingBindingElement();             messageEncoding.MessageVersion = MessageVersion.Soap11;             bindingElements.Add(messageEncoding);             HttpsTransportBindingElement transport = new HttpsTransportBindingElement();             bindingElements.Add(transport);             return bindingElements.Clone();         }     }

Now pass this class object as the first parameter to your Interface Object Initialization.

Example: Previous code:

Dim accountclient As New OSC.AccountServiceClient()cleartext.blogspot.com

New code

Dim endpointAddress = New EndpointAddress(New Uri("URL”))  ‘ give the url here.
Dim accountclient As New OSC.AccountServiceClient(New UsernameTokenOverSslBinding(), endpointAddress)

 

…And thats it ! The object will now be able to connect to the server via a webservice call.

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2: Possible workaround:  The other possible workaround is to add these lines to app.config file.

 

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Any of these workarounds, and you should start seeing the response object: