WebADI and Erroneous Task Names (Part 1)
Oracle WebADI is a commonly used tool for quickly uploading a vast array of data into a Project. Having spent time and effort creating the WebADI data, for the thousands of ADI users, the sad red face not only represents failure to load Project critical data but also represents frustration. This frustration is sometimes caused by poor data integrity which can be avoided by adopting best practice approaches and communicating these to the user community to ensure consistency.
An understandable mistake
I witnessed one such issue recently at a client site where on the face of it (excuse the pun), an “understandable” mistake led to much user annoyance. Whilst attempting to load financial plan data into the Project Management application using Web ADI, a user kept receiving the error message: “An error has occurred while running an API import”.
So what does this message mean? At first glance, not much but after analysing the reasons why, this error related to an erroneous character used within the Task name on the Project. The character in question was a single quotation mark (‘). With the rollout of WebADI and tens of thousands of existing Task names used in the application, a prompt check of other erroneous characters was required. Surprisingly, the single quotation mark remained as the only character which would not allow an upload from WedADI. Good news! Now Oracle… what about the single quotation mark?
The other characters tested included . ‘ & , * > < ; : ! ” % £ ^ ( + _ = # / @ ~ { [ $
Lesson Learnt
Avoid using the quotation mark (‘) in Task names if you plan to upload data such as financial plan amounts using WebADI. Now excuse me while I go and update all the erroneous task names… is it that simple?
In Part 2, I will discuss the corrective measures required if a financial plan that is using planning resources already exists on the Project.
thanks for posting – this is great. I have also learned that ending a planning resource with ‘-’ could cause issues.