Flexfield Concepts

Flexfield in Oracle Apps - Oracle Apps forms and reports are designed to be flexible and to accommodate many kinds of business rules for a wide variety of situations. Along with the innumerable predetermined fields that appear on each screen, most screens can accommodate the entry of additional information through the use of flexfields.

Types of Oracle Apps Flexfields:

1. Key Flexfield:
1.1 Most organizations use ”codes” made up of meaningful segments (intelligent keys) to identify general ledger accounts, part numbers, and other business entities. Each segment of the code can represent a characteristic of the entity. Oracle Applications store these ”codes” in key flexfields.
1.2 Key flexfields are flexible enough to let any organization use the code scheme they want, without programming. One has to decide what each segment means, what values each segment can have, and what the segment values mean. An organization can define rules to specify which segment values can be combined to make a valid complete code (also called a combination). One can also define relationships among the segments.
1.3 Key flexfields are dynamic in the sense that they are used throughout the Applications to uniquely identify information - GL accounts, inventory items etc, that every business needs to keep track of.

2. Descriptive Flexfield:
2.1 Descriptive Flexfields (DFFs) enable to capture additional pieces of information from transactions entered into Oracle Applications. Descriptive flexfields provide customisable ”expansion space” on your forms.
2.2 One can use descriptive flexfields to track additional information, important and unique to your business that would not otherwise be captured by the form.
2.3 Each field or segment in a descriptive flexfield has a prompt, just like ordinary fields, and can have a set of valid values.
2.4 An organization can define dependencies among the segments or customize a descriptive flexfield.

Flexfield Concepts:

1. Segment:
@ A single sub–field within a flexfield.
@ Represented in the database as a single table column.
@ Usually describes a particular characteristic of the entity identified by the flexfield
@ Determines the structure of the Key flexfield (say chart of accounts).
@ Each segment requires a value set to be defined and assigned.
@ One has to be very clear on how many segments are required, their order and validation.

These decisions affect the definition of value sets and their values.

2.Value, Validation (Validate), Value set:
@ Oracle Application Object Library uses values, value sets and validation tables as important components of key flexfields, descriptive flexfields, and Standard Request Submission. The end user enters a segment value into a segment while using an application.
@ Generally, the flexfield validates each segment against a set of valid values (a ”value set”) that are usually predefined. One can share value sets among segments in different flexfields, segments in different structures of the same flexfield, and even segments within the same flexfield structure. Value sets can be shared across key and descriptive flexfields.

Because the conditions one specifies for the value sets determine what values to be used with them, both the values and the value sets should be planned at the same time.

3. Structure:
A flexfield structure is a specific configuration of segments. If you add or remove segments,
or rearrange the order of segments in a flexfield, you get a different structure. You can
define multiple segment structures for the same flexfield (if that flexfield has been built to
support more than one structure).