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