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Removing unwanted Mileage UoMs from an i-Expense Claim (Part 1)

Blog article showing how to personalize the Unit of Measure list of values for Mileage where one single value is required as read only, i.e. Miles.

Oracle Internet Expenses comes seeded with three Mileage ‘Unit of Measures‘, namely Miles, Kilometers and Swedish Miles. Without trying to offend our friends from Sweden, it is often the case that an end user of Oracle i-Expenses will only want to see and use the unit of measure(s) that are relevant to the business expense policy or geographical region in which they operate. When creating an expense claim and selecting the expense type of ‘Mileage’ users often ask the questions:

Why do I see Swedish Miles?
or
Can I just have Miles?
or
Can you remove all values in the Unit of Measure list and just keep the one that is relevant for our T&S policy?

For users in other regions, the same question may well include the desire to remove Miles (e.g. regions in mainland Europe) or Kilometers (e.g. UK). The screenshot below shots the seeded view of values a user is presented with when entering a mileage claim.

and then the Expense Report line details:

The seeded list of values for Mileage UOM’s are contained within the Payables Lookup set called OIE_DISTANCE_UOM. This is a system lookup set and therefore the values cannot be disabled or end dated. Meanings and descriptions can be updated but this does not change the fact that the values will remain and will continue to be referenced when entering an expense claim both at the expense line and expense line detail levels.

So how does one reduce this list values to include only the mileage UOM’s that are relevant? This article will explain how to remove the Swedish Miles and Kilometers values to leave a default read only value for miles.

Expense Report (ER) Lines

To remove/reduce the list of values on the expense report line, this can be achieved by configuring the user interface using an OA Framework personalisation of the ER lines html page. Before any personalisation’s are possible the profile option ‘Personalize Self-Service Defn‘ has to be set to ‘Yes’. It is advisable to set this at the user level for the person carrying out the personalisation to avoid the rest of the business seeing the personalised region links within the application while this work is being performed. The next steps are as followed:

1. Create an expense report ensuring you stop at the point where the unit of measure of displayed for a mileage expense line
2. Click the ‘Personalize Page‘ hyperlink at the top right corner of the html page
3. Within the Personalize page, use the search criteria and choose the style of ‘Message Choice’
4. Enter ‘Unit of Measure’ within the Title/Prompt/Text search field and click GO
5. Click the personalize pencil icon against the row which contains the ‘Message Choice: Unit of Measure’
6. Once you have decided at which level to set the personalization, i.e. site, organisation, responsibility etc, set the Read Only value to ‘true’ (shown below)
7. Click Apply
8. Navigate back to the ER lines and check the results. You should now be presented with a read only value for Miles where the list of values is no longer a selectable list.

Expense Report (ER) Line Details

Unfortunately, no personalization is available for the expense line details. During a recent i-Expenses implementation, I raised an SR with Oracle on this very subject. The following customization is recommended by Oracle My Support:

Modify the $JAVA_TOP/oracle/apps/ap/oie/server/UnitOfMeasuresVO.xml by adding the following condition in the select statement:

and lookup_code in (‘MILES’) –valid values are ‘KM’,’MILES’,’SWMILES’

Note: Include the ones that you wish to see in the poplist.

Conclusion

The solution above combines a personalisation and a very simple customisation. Any business adopting this solution should pay attention to future patching and upgrade strategies and understand how any changes may impact this solution.

Adopting the ER Line detail customisation achieves the desired result; however, customisations should always be the last resort after all other possibilities have been investigated. At Prōject we have found a better solution to the requirement of amending the Mileage UoM for the ER line details. See Part 2 of this blog article for more information.

31 Jan, 2012 by Ian Boyling

E-Business Suite