Arideep Mukherjee

ERPWebtutor
11/16/2011
Profile Options - Notes
Profile Options - Notes

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Profile Options in Oracle Apps?
Profile Options in Oracle Apps provide flexibility to the product. It is extremely crucial to understand this
concept and there is no way an Oracle consultant can afford NOT to learn this concept.
The profile option acts like a Global Variable in Oracle. There are 2 types of profile options:
1. System Profile Options Profile options that come predefined. E.g HR: Security Profile
2. User Profile Options Profile options that are created by the development team to add flexibility to the
application. This is basically a set of changeable options that affect the way your application looks and
behaves. Typically a system administrator set these options at the site level but these can be set at
desired levels based on need.
Profile Options can set at the following levels:
Site Lowest Priority
Application
Responsibility
Organization/Operating Unit
User Highest Priority
Settings affect as soon as user signs on or change responsibility.
Navigation to assign values for a profile option:
(R)System Administrator > Profile > System

In the above screenshot we see that the profile option HR: Security Profile has a value Setup Business Group
but the value is Demo Corp Business Group at the responsibility level. This indicates that when we switch to
the Demo US Super HRMS Manager responsibility the profile option HR: Security Profile will use the value
Demo Corp Business Group for assigning the security rules. The Demo Corp Business Group is a security rule
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that has been set up in HR to allow/prevent access of employee information to a user using a particular HR
responsibility.
Why to use Profile Options?
These are provided to keep the application flexible. The business rules in various countries and various
companies can be different. Hence the profile options are delivered by Oracle in such a manner so that we can
avoid hard-coding of logic, and to let the implementation team at site decide the values of those variables.
Where to Use Profile Options? A practical Scenario
Lets assume a company Demo Corporation. The screenshot below is the company hierarchy:

So we can see that there are 3 departments in this organization:
Finance
Human Resources
IT
Our requirement is to make sure that the manager of IT and Finance Department should ONLY be able to view its
own employees and NOT those belonging to others and manager of Human Resources Department should be able
to view employees across all departments.
Solution:
Here is the employee hierarchy. What we are trying to achieve here is that the Director of HR (Robin Paul) should
be able to view employees of the entire organization where as Director IT (Alan lamb) should only be able to see
the employees belonging to his department.
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Steve Nash
100.CEO
Kobe Bryant
102.CFO
Brad Jackson
103.President
Samuel Pitt
105.Vice President
Alan Lamb
107.Director IT
Robin Paul
107.Director HR
David Boon
107.Director Finance
Derek James
203.HR Manager
John Hobbs
201.IT Manager
Lebron Fisher
205.Accounting
Manager
Ben Heinz
303.HR Supervisor
Warren Jobs
601.Accounting Clerk
Steve King
301.IT Supervisor
Ram Singh
403.IT Programmer
Sam Holden
401.IT Analyst
Diego Gomez
501.HR Officer


Lets see how the security profiles will look like.
Navigation:
(R) Demo US Super HRMS Manager > Security > Profile
Profile to View all employees within the organization

Note the security
type. It says view all
organizations
Note that there are no
restrictions on viewing
employee records
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Profile to View employees within the department only


Now we have the responsibility Demo US Super HRMS Manager. We need to set up the following profile option:
Profile Option: HR: Security Profile
Level: Responsibility
Responsibility Name: Demo US Super HRMS Manager


We will now assign this responsibility to the user account that belongs to Robin Paul.
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Now we can log in as RPAUL and check the employees that we can view and we will see that we are able
to view all the employees.


Profile Options - Notes

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Now we have another responsibility Demo HR User. We need to set up the following profile option:
Profile Option: HR: Security Profile
Level: Responsibility
Responsibility Name: Demo HR User


We will now assign this responsibility to the user account that belongs to Alan Lamb.

Now we can log in as RPAUL, use the Demo HR User responsibility and check the employees that we can
view and we will see that we are able to view only those employees who belong the IT Department.

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Another example of Profile Option
The following profile option allows the user to make changes to the layouts of a self-service screen:
Personalize Self-Service Defn
This profile option is mostly set at the user level enabling that particular user to make changes to the
layouts of the self-service screens such as changing the prompt, hiding a field etc. Lets take a look.


Profile Options - Notes

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In this case we see that value is set to Yes for the DEMOUSER which enables that user to make the changes
mentioned earlier but it is set to No at the site level so that any user who logs in should not be able to make those
changes.
Now let us take a look at the screen when DEMOUSER logs in:






Now let us log in as a different user and check if we can see the link.

As we see here there is no such link available.



Note the link
Personalize Page has
appeared when
DEMOUSER has logged
in.