Saturday, October 3, 2009

Core HR: Profiles for DateTracking

Question: The profile DateTrack: Date Security enables to:
Option a) Set your effective date to perform transactions in the past, present or future dates
Option b) Enables setup of security restrictions for responsibilities and functions
Option c) Enables setup of security restrictions for responsibilities, menus and functions
Option d) Option b and c
Correct Option a

Question: The profile DateTrack: Reminder is helpful for
Option a) Reminding the user when the next transaction is due to begin
Option b) Reminding the user of all the historical transactions that have occurred on the record
Option c) Reminding the user of all the future transactions that are pending on the record
Option d) Reminding the user on the effective date whenever a window containing date tracked information is opened
Correct Option d

I saw these two questions at a site recently on HRMS quiz and this prompted me to explore the rest of the date-track profiles that exist in Oracle and understand their usages. Questions like these are common in objective type quizzes that one may encounter in objective tests. Hope this learning helps you.

DateTrack:Date Security profile option determines whether you are allowed to change your effective date. This is generally set by the system administrator in the beginning of the project and contains the following values:
All: You can change to any other effective date.
Future: You can change between today's date and any future dates.
Past: You can change between today's date and any past dates.
Present: You cannot change to a date other than today.
DateTrack:Reminder profile option displays a pop-up decision window that prompts you with the effective date settings whenever you open a window that contains datetracked information. Though many see this window as a pain in the neck due to its constant appearance whenever you open a form that has date-tracking, but I would strongly recommend to enable this profile, especially during configuring / testing phase and also when you have relatively inexperienced users handling the application. This profile has three options:
Always pop warning window
Never pop warning window
Not Today

Always and Never are self-explanatory, but the ‘Not Today’ option causes the reminder to appear when you navigate to a datetracked window and your effective date is not today's date.

There are two other profiles that are related to datetracking, but which are not set at the user level. They are:
DateTrack Enabled: This should be set to “Yes” at the application level and
DateTrack:Login Date (YYYY/MM/DD): I haven’t seen this being used much. This profile is generally set together with the profile DateTrack:Date Security. Set this to a value early enough (like 1900/01/01) so that users may not set a date earlier than this. If a user has the has DateTrack:Date Security set to Future and DateTrack:Login Date set to 1900/01/01,they can change their effective date to any date after January 1 1900,but not before.
As I said earlier, I have rarely seen this profile being edited frequently.
Hope this information is helpful.