FlexFields in Oracle Applications

Overview of Flexfields:

A flexfield is a field which is made up of sub–fields, or segments. There are two types of flexfields: key flexfields and descriptive flexfields.

Key Flexfields:

A Key flexfield is a field made up of segments, where each segment has both a value and a meaning, which appears on your form as a normal text field with an appropriate prompt.

One example of a key flexfield is the Accounting Flexfield. This flexfield can always be customized to have as many segments as needed like Company, Department, Cost center, Account etc.

These will be stored in columns called segment1, segment2, segment3,.....segment29, segment30.

Advantages:-

• Information will be secured
• Information will be very clear
• We can generate the Reports at any segment as per the client requirement
• We can define cross-validation rules so that user cannot enter invalid data.  

Descriptive flexfields:

Descriptive flexfields lets you add additional fields to the form in order to track additional information needed by the business that would not be captured by the standard form. Descriptive flexfields can be context sensitive, where the information your application stores depends on other values your users enter in other parts of the form.

A descriptive flexfield appears on a form as a single–character, unnamed field enclosed in Square Brackets [ ]. Each field or segment in a descriptive flexfield has a prompt and can have a set of valid values

Descriptive Flexfield Concepts:

Descriptive Flexfield Segments:

Descriptive flexfields have two different types of segments, global and context–sensitive.

A global segment is a segment that always appears in the descriptive flexfield pop–up window.

A context–sensitive segment is a segment that may or may not appear depending upon what other information is present in your form.

A descriptive flexfield can get context information from either a field somewhere on the form, or from a special field (a context field) inside the descriptive flexfield pop–up window. If the descriptive flexfield derives the context information from a form field (either displayed or hidden from users), that field is called a reference field for the descriptive flexfield.

How and where are the segment information is stored:

A descriptive flexfield uses columns that are added on to a database table. A descriptive flexfield requires one column for each possible segment and one additional column in which to store structure information (that is, the context value). The descriptive flexfield columns are usually named ATTRIBUTEn where n is a number.

For example, if you have a descriptive flexfield on an Order Entry (Header) form, it populates the Structure column with the context field and the columns ATTRIBUTEn with the flexfield segments of the table OE_ORDER_HEADERS_ALL.