Collaborate 2011 Schedule and Book Signing

Collaborate is only a couple of days away. If you are a reader, I'd love to meet you. Here are some times and places we can connect:

• Monday, 5/11 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM -- Exhibition Hall PeopleTools demo pod.
• Tuesday, 5/12 10:15 AM - 2:00 PM -- Exhibition Hall PeopleTools demo pod.
• Tuesday, 5/12 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM -- Session 85680 PeopleTools 8.51 Highlights - PeopleTools in Action room 203B (Quest)
• Tuesday, 5/12 4:30 PM - 5:00 PM -- Book signing at the Collaborate book store
• Tuesday, 5/12 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM -- Exhibition Hall PeopleTools demo pod
• Wednesday, 5/13 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM -- Session 85670 PeopleTools Tips and Techniques room 203A (Quest)
• Wednesday, 5/13 10:15 AM - 4:00 PM -- Exhibition Hall PeopleTools demo pod

McGraw Hill was also able to schedule a special book signing event for Tuesday between 4:30 PM and 5:00 PM. Follow me down to the book store after my PeopleTools in Action session, buy a book, and I'll sign it for you. If I lose you, I've been told the bookstore is next to registration. See you there!

Pagelets, WorkCenters, etc in White Paper

Some of my friends from sales and product strategy just put together a very nice white paper on some of the new features in PeopleTools and Applications Portal (formerly known as Enterprise Portal). I created some of the content in the screen shots (home page layout, accordion navigation collections, slide show news publications, etc) and they did all the writing. Download a copy and see what you can do with your PeopleSoft application. The paper is titled PeopleSoft Applications Portal and WorkCenter Pages.

blogger.com's Views

Have you seen blogger.com's new dynamic views? For my site, most aren't that exciting, but the flip card view for labels is pretty interesting. Rather than just seeing the usual label (count), you can see the actual titles under each label.

Alliance 2011

I'm just finishing my demos for this year's Alliance conference. I will present session 29321, PeopleTools Tips and Tricks, on Monday morning from 9:30 to 10:30 in Korbel 4A-C. In this session I will present some mobile, mashup, and ajax solutions as well as tips for debugging these client/server HTTP interactions. On Tuesday, I will show you some of the new PT 8.50/51 features during the session 29332 "PeopleTools 8.51 in Action" at 12:45 in Korbel 4A-C.

If you are not able to attend these sessions, then please feel free to chat with me in the Exhibition Hall or at Meet the Experts. I will be in the Exhibition Hall Sunday from 5:30 to 8:30, Monday from 12:45 to 2:15, and again on Tuesday from 12:30 to 2:15. I will be at the Meet the Experts PeopleTools table on Monday from 4:30 to 5:30 and on Tuesday from 9:30 to 10:30.

I can't wait to see you there!!

JavaScript Meta blog

JavaScript is a critical component of PeopleSoft applications. With the web browser pretty much taking over as the rendering engine for enterprise applications, I see JavaScript as a critical language for computer professionals. Of course, technologies like PeopleTools and ADF contain abstraction layers so application developers do not have to write JavaScript, but, in the end, someone has to write the JavaScript generated by those abstraction layers. And, if something goes wrong, odds are very good you will have to dig through the generated JavaScript to see what went wrong (where, when, why, etc).

Anyway, I think JavaScript is one of the most important modern languages a programmer can learn, and I know I'm not alone in this opinion. Of late, I've found some very interesting online resources for people interested in learning JavaScript, so I wrote this post to pass those resources along to PeopleSoft developers.

I will maintain this as a "Meta-blog" post and update it as I find more resources. I will attempt to keep the list short, so you don't have to sift through thousands of irrelevant tutorials. Restated: this is not a complete list. It is just a short list of tutorials that I think stand above the rest.

• Eloquent JavaScript Beginner This is a very well done, hands on JavaScript tutorial. It is released under the Creative Commons license so you can download it and run the tutorials from your laptop while traveling, etc.
• JavaScript Garden The Quirky parts of JavaScript
• The JavaScript Module Pattern Advanced
• OOP in JS, Part 1 : Public/Private Variables and Methods
• OOP in JS, Part 2 : Inheritance
• jQuery UI Dialogs in PeopleSoft

OOW 2010 Presentations Available

Oracle OpenWorld OnDemand is now available and includes slides and audio for each of the sessions in which I presented. Here are the OnDemand links:

• PeopleTools Tips and Tricks Slides and Audio
• PeopleSoft PeopleTools Developer Series: Building a Custom Mobile Application Slides
• Monster Mashups: Related Content in PeopleSoft Applications Audio

If you were not able to attend OpenWorld 2010, you can purchase OnDemand here.

Going Mobile with PeopleSoft

Chapter 14 of my PeopleTools Tips & Techniques book walks you step-by-step through creating a mobile application. That chapter uses a CI based web service and Oracle ADF to demonstrate some of the simple drag-and-drop tools provided by Oracle. Even though the technique demonstrated appears simple, if you start to dig into the generated code and try to work directly with the Web Service Data Control, you will quickly see that JDeveloper does a very, very good job of hiding the real complexities behind web services. For this year's OpenWorld, I wanted to show just how simple it could be to create a mobile app for PeopleSoft. For my prototype, I chose to build a mobile worklist out of plain HTML, JavaScript, and CSS (it seems to me that plain HTML, JavaScript, and CSS is about as simple as web development gets). Without a server side technology like JDeveloper's ADF and JSF, I knew my mobile app would have to communicate with PeopleSoft using Ajax. As it turns out, most modern mobile browsers support XHR (as of BlackBerry 6, Torch, the BlackBerry browser is now WebKit - YEAH!!!), but I knew having a good mobile JavaScript library like jQuery would certainly help. A quick google search turned up xuijs, which happens to be modeled after jQuery. Using jEdit, my favorite syntax highlighting text editor, I prototyped the user interface, substituting Ajax URL's for local text files. After ironing out the server side requirements, I set about creating the Integration Broker App Class synchronous request handlers that my app would require. To make my HTML and JavaScript as simple as possible, I wrote my handlers to return data in JSON and JSONP format. While my JavaScript and PeopleCode may prove to be of some interest to you, I believe the most important concept from this exercise is the mechanism for calling Integration Broker from Ajax. To execute a web service from an HTTP GET (basic Ajax in REST-like fashion), you use a URL similar to:

http://your.peoplesoft.server/PSIGW/HttpListeningConnector?Operation=YOUR_OPERATION_NAME.v1&OperationType=Sync

Calling any service operation implies, of course, that you have a message, service, service operation, handler, and an any-to-local routing.

My point for sharing this is that we easily forget how simple an application can be. PeopleTools provides the integration architecture. It is up to us to pick a language we are comfortable developing with. If your organization prefers .Net over Java, then write your web based mobile app in .Net. The language doesn't matter. Pretty much any language can make an HTTP request to the Integration Broker and then process the response. The keys are:

• Knowing how to call Integration Broker
• Remembering that the mobile device has a much smaller screen

That is about all there is to building mobile applications. Pretty simple... right?

Posting Data to IScripts

If you are a regular reader, you already know that I am a big fan of Ajax. Most of my PeopleSoft Ajax requests use HTTP GET operations to send query string parameters to iScripts. I have considered using POST to send structured data to iScripts (XML, JSON, etc), but have not found reason to do so. Considering my background in other web based languages, I just assumed the %Request object provided direct access to posted content. I didn't really look until I saw an IT Toolbox forum question from KCWeaver asking how to post data to an iScript. The Request object does have a GetContentBody() method that will return POST'd data. What PeopleBooks doesn't tell you is how to activate the GetContentBody method (Note: I don't think this is an oversight. I think it is because GetContentBody is designed for Business Interlinks, not for iScripts). Special thanks to Kevin for digging through the documentation and figuring out how to POST to an iScript. The trick is to add postDataBin=y to the end of your query string.

View the full IT Toolbox thread here: AJAX to iScript

PeopleTools Tips Sample Chapter Available

Are you still trying to decide whether or not to buy my new PeopleTools book? Would a sample chapter help? The McGraw Hill page for this book allows you to download chapter 3 for free. Chapter 3 contains step by step instructions for workflow enabling a transaction using the relatively new Approval Workflow Engine (new in PeopleTools 8.48). If you have ever had trouble configuring AWE and wondered if it was possible to trace the stage, step, path, approver selection information, you will want to take a look at the Tracing AWE sidebar on page 125 (page 35 of the PDF).

PeopleTools Tips at OpenWorld

I have checked in at my local airport and am en route to OpenWorld, the largest tech conference of the year. I'm pretty well finished preparing my demos for this year's session, and am using this time to finish my slides. I am very pleased with my demos this year as I think they demonstrate some very powerful ways to enhance PeopleSoft applications. Two of my primary topics for this year are Mashups and Mobile. I see Mashups as an alternative to Integration. Of course, you still need integrations, but whenever possible, I look for a Mashup alternative because Mashups general don't require modifications. In this session I will present some Mashup ideas and ways to ensure security.

Mobile... I find mobile to be one of the most fascinating ideas. I work remote (no office), and, therefore, am 100% mobile (at least in theory). PeopleTools has been relatively silent in regards to mobile. PeopleSoft Applications have built some very exciting mobile apps (see Theresa's blog post and video), but PeopleTools is silent. After reviewing a handful of mobile development strategies, I am actually quite pleased with the mobile development solutions available to PeopleSoft customers. I'm finding that even though PeopleTools is silent in regards to mobile, the PeopleTools architecture lends itself very well to mobile development. In my PeopleTools Tips session on Monday I will demonstrate two separate mobile applications. The first is a mobile employee directory built using ADF and the web service data control. The second application uses plain old JavaScript and HTML to display a mobile worklist. This second application excites me the most because it shows that mobile development can be simple - No SOAP, no WSDL, no frameworks, no data bindings... just plain JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and PeopleCode.

Besides mobile and mashups, I also included:

• Monkeypatching - what is it and how can I/why would I use it?
• Debugging integrations - tools that facilitate debugging.
• Pagelet Wizard - what is it, how can I use it, how can I extend it?

See you Monday at 5:00 PM in the Marriott, Golden Gate A (session id S317016). You won't be disappointed!

PeopleTools 8.51 Now Generally Available

PeopleTools 8.51 is now Generally Available (meaning, you can download it from eDelivery). You can find the hosted PeopleBooks for 8.51 here. The PeopleTools 8.51 documentation home is here.

URL Administration (Nodes and URL Definitions)

I use URL's quite extensively for Ajax and other non-Integration Broker integrations (NEVER HARD CODE URL'S!). PeopleTools provides a couple of ways to store URL information. The most well-known of these features is the URL definition (PeopleTools > Utilities > Administration > URLs). URL Definitions are great for relative URL's, but I'm not fond of storing fully qualified URL's in this manner. Here is why...

Imagine having 5 URL's that point to different resources on the same server and then one day the server's host name changes. Because of this change I have to modify 5 URL definitions. What if I forget one?

An alternative is to store the base URL in a node definition and then the relative portion of the URL in a URL definition. Creating a fully qualified URL in this manner requires concatenating two definitions: the node URI and the URL definition. Next Question: How do I access these Meta-data objects from PeopleCode? Most of us are familiar with the GetURL PeopleCode function, but what mechanism does PeopleCode offer for retrieving a node's Content and Portal URI?

A PeopleSoft instance's node definitions are accessible through the %Session object. The Session object contains a method named GetNodes which returns a collection of the instance's node definitions. A call to the collections FindItemByName method returns a reference to a single node, which, of course, has properties of its own. Putting this all together, returning the Portal URI of a node named UCM would require PeopleCode that looks something like:

Local string &serverUrl = %Session.GetNodes().ItemByName("UCM").PortalURI;

By centralizing the base portion of the URL in a node definition, we save some administration overhead.

OpenWorld in Two Weeks!

OpenWorld is almost here! In less than 3 weeks, we will all be together again for the biggest Oracle apps and technology reunion of the year... and possibly, the biggest ever, with JavaOne and Oracle Develop co-located with OpenWorld.

This year I am teaming up with my good friend Graham Smith to deliver the "best of" PeopleTools Tips for 2010. Expect to see more PeopleTools 8.50 content in our presentation this year. Graham and I will be on stage Monday evening from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM at the Marriott Golden Gate A (session id S317016). You will NOT want to miss this session!

On Thursday you can see Matthew, Pramod, and myself present Monster Mashups, a session about creating mashups using the PeopleTools 8.50 related content framework. That session will be held at Moscone West room 2014 from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM (session ID S317448).

Besides these sessions, I'll be working the PeopleTools Integration Tools demo pod Monday morning and all of Tuesday. Later during the week, however, I hope to spend some time in the Fusion Apps UI demo pod.

On Wednesday I plan to spend a half hour at the Oracle Bookstore signing copies of my new book. I will be there from 10:00 AM to 10:30 AM during the Meet the Authors time slot. If you have a copy of my book, bring it with you so I can sign it! If you don't have a copy, I'm sure the Oracle bookstore will be more than happy to sell you a copy. Meet the Authors actually runs Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 10:30 AM, but I have demo grounds responsibilities Monday and Tuesday, so I won't be able to attend the first two days.

Get Your Kindle Copy

The Kindle edition of my PeopleTools Tips and Techniques book is now available. Download a copy from Amazon's site here.

The Code is now Available!

The code for my new book PeopleSoft PeopleTools Tips & Techniques is now available. There is a download link on the book's McGraw Hill page. Look for the Downloads section. Enjoy!

Comment Moderation is now On

Sigh... I really didn't want to enable comment moderation. When I post to a blog with comment moderation, I always wonder if my comment will appear. I also like to see my comments appear immediately. What if the moderator is on vacation? Unfortunately, I find myself in a position where I HAVE to enable comment moderation. Some organization has been posting pornographic links as comments on my blog and has been doing this for about six months. I have been diligent in deleting those comments, but then it occurred to me that each subscriber to a post was receiving these links as unsolicited e-mail. I WILL NOT ALLOW ANYONE TO MOLEST MY READERS IN THIS MANNER! I find it utterly distasteful and disgraceful. If someone wants to view pornography, that is their business, but I will not allow my blog to be used to tempt/lure people into pornography. The temptation is too much for some to handle. Just as alcoholism, gambling addiction, or many other social ills start as harmless entertainment, pornography can get way out of hand.

If you have been trapped by one of the e-mail comments sent from my blog and need help, I want to provide you with some resources. I think it is the least I can do. I have no experience in this issue, so I'm just listing what I googled on the topic: Abuse and Addiction: Pornography and Cybersex and Dads.org.

Yes, you can still post comments on my blog. I really, really enjoy reading and responding to comments. I learn a lot from my readers. The unfortunate side affect of this parasite is that you will have to wait for me to read and approve your comments before they appear on this site. I really apologize for this. I wish there was something else I could do.

The Book is Shipping, but Where is the Code?

Amazon has been shipping my new PeopleTools book for about a week now... but where is the source code? The honest truth? It is on my laptop. I am in the process of exporting the code from my test PeopleSoft instance. I am up to chapter 9. I am averaging about 2 chapters a night, so I expect to finish this week. Once I finish, I'll send it to Oracle Press and they will post it on their web site at http://www.oraclepressbooks.com/.

Update 15-July-2010: I sent the code to the publisher last night. It is now in their production department awaiting posting. I will update again when it is available.

Update: The code is now available. You can find information in this blog post.

At UKOUG With a Copy of My New Book

I am presenting at the PeopleSoft UKOUG conference this week. It is always a pleasure to catch up with my English and European colleagues. I was able to acquire an advanced copy of my new book PeopleSoft PeopleTools Tips & Techniques. I will have the book with me during the conference, and will gladly show it to anyone who asks.

Marketing Flyer for PeopleTools Tips Book

The marketing flyer for my PeopleSoft PeopleTools Tips and Techniques book is now available. If you are unable to see the embedded flyer below, you can download a copy from my box.net account: PeopleTools Tips and Techniques flyer.

Enable View Source in Online HTML Editor

If you use the Pagelet Wizard or Enterprise Portal's Managed Content features, then you have likely seen the PeopleTools online rich text editor. With PeopleTools 8.50, PeopleSoft switched to the CKEditor and added rich text editor configuration options to App Designer. This allows you to turn any long text field into a rich text field (although I don't recommend doing so, as it can have a negative impact on reporting).

The former rich text editor had a view source button. For security reasons, the PeopleTools team removed the view source button from this release. If you trust the users that have access to rich text editor pages (like the pagelet wizard) and would like to re-enable the view source button, then add 'Source','-', to the config.toolbar array in your rich text editor configuration. Here is a fragment of the configuration file:

        config.toolbar =
[
        ['Source','-','Maximize','

Where do you find your rich text editor's configuration? The PeopleBooks appendix Creating Custom Plug-in Files for the Rich Text Editor describes how to configure rich text editors on a per-page, per-editor basis. To change the default configuration, open the ckeditor/config.js file in your webserver's domain directory. For example, if your web server domain is named portal, open $PS_HOME/webserv/portal/applications/peoplesoft/PORTAL.war/portal/ckeditor/config.js.