I absolutely love Isolated Customization strategies such as Event Mapping and App Engine Action Plugins. These strategies allow us to extend Oracle's delivered solution without touching Oracle-delivered code. The benefit is more efficient maintenance cycles because of fewer retrofits.
Both of these features, Event Mapping and App Engine Action Plugins, have one shortcoming: You may not use them to inject code into the middle of an Oracle-delivered code listing. Event Mapping and App Engine Action Plugins only allow code to be inserted before or after an entire listing. What if you need to inject code in the middle? Until recently, the only option was to continue modifying Oracle's delivered code.
Both Event Mapping and App Engine Action Plugins have a feature allowing a developer to replace or override Oracle's delivered code listing with your own. Customers looking for "clean" compare reports may be tempted to copy the Oracle-delivered code into their own code listing, modify it, and then replace/override Oracle's delivered code. The end result is a clean compare report and hopefully less work when applying maintenance.
But does it really work that way? Let's say you take this approach. You clone Oracle's delivered code into your own code listing. You modify your copy. You use Event Mapping or App Engine Action Plugins to replace Oracle's code. Time passes, and you apply maintenance. Since the compare reports show no customizations, you adopt Oracle's changes with no retrofits. You test the system, and because of your overrides, the system continues using your code, not Oracle's code. This is good, right? Isn't this what you want? MAYBE NOT! Oracle delivered maintenance for a reason. Did they patch a security vulnerability? Did they fix a bug? Did they alter the data model or business logic in a manner that renders your clone less effective?
If you use the override/replace in this manner, you have no way of knowing what Oracle "fixed." The only way to know that you are using the latest version of their code is to perform your own manual compare and retrofit outside of PeopleTools. And if you are going to do that, wouldn't it be easier to just modify Oracle-delivered anyway? You know what is worse? Since overridden and replaced code listings don't show on compare reports, your system may be fully patched and still suffer security vulnerabilities in your clones of Oracle-delivered code.
The Override/Replace features are fantastic for REPLACING Oracle's delivered code. In other words, if you don't want Oracle's code to run at all, then override or replace it.
Want to learn more about PeopleTools Event Mapping? Check out our one-day on-demand Event Mapping course! Or even better, subscribe and get a full year of access to the entire JSMpros on-demand PeopleTools training library!
Want to further reduce your maintenance workload? Replace customization analysis and review with PeopleSoft's Automated Testing Tool (PTF). Learn how through our two-day PTF course, which is available on-demand and live!
