Need for change

When upgrading an E-Business Suite implementation from R11i to R12 we ran into a problem. In R11i the customer had a couple of custom pages for uploading and downloading Excel sheets with some validation on the filename and submitting a concurrent process to process the uploaded Excel Sheet. Those pages were built with HTML PL/SQL (htp package) and made accessible via functions of Function Type: 'SSWA plsql function that opens a new window (Kiosk Mode)'. It appears to me that the first E-Business Suite HTML pages (self-service pages) were built using this technique. However, this Function Type is no longer working in R12, although the system still accepted this Funcion Type as a valid value. So, we had to look for an alternative:

• (Re)use the generic Upload / Download functions introduced in R12 (System Administrator > Generic File Manager); 
• Build static HTML pages and put this file under $OA_HTML directory (Function Type : 'JSP Interoperable with OA' and HTML Call: name of the file);
• Build custom pages using OAF; 
• Integrate Oracle Application Express (APEX) and develop the same functionality.

It wouldn't be interesting for this blog if we had not opted for the last option :-)