Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (Oracle BRM formally known as Portal Infranet) provides two ways for creating, editing, and deleting custom fields and storable classes.
Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (Oracle BRM \ formally known as Portal Infranet) provides two ways for creating, editing, and deleting custom fields and storable classes. One way is by using Storable Class Editor, part of the Developer Center application, or the alternative approach, by using SDK opcodes. Personally, I prefer the latter choice and in this post I will cover manipulating custom fields with SDK opcodes.
Before we begin, there is one change we need to apply first. It is necessary to make the data dictionary writable. Here's how it's done:
1. Open the Oracle DM or Microsoft SQL Server DM configuration file
(BRM_HOME/sys/dm_oracle/pin.conf or BRM_HOME/sys/dm_odbc/pin.conf) in a text editor.
2. Enable field manipulation in the data dictionary by setting the following entry to 1:
- dm dd_write_enable_fields 1
Our objectives are as follows:
1. Create a custom field
2. Edit the custom field description
3. Delete the custom field from the database
4. Make the custom fields available to BRM
Create a New Custom Field
Creating a new custom field and committing it to the database can be done with SDK opcodes or with a pin_deploy utility. As developers, SDK opcodes provide a more flexible way to create, edit, delete custom fields at the development stage. The pin_deploy
utility, on the other hand, uses PODL (Portal Object Definition Language) to export and import field and storable class definitions, which is more useful at the administrative level because we can streamline the process by putting field definitions into source code management and therevy reduce the possibility of damaging the Oracle BRM production database data dictionary.
We can use the following SDK opcodes to manage field specifications:
1. PCM_OP_SDK_SET_FLD_SPECS - create or modify a field,
2. PCM_OP_SDK_GET_FLD_SPECS - retrieve a field specs,
3. PCM_OP_SDK_DEL_FLD_SPECS - delete a field.
To create a field, I need to write an input flist for PCM_OP_SDK_SET_FLD_SPECS opcode:
0 PIN_FLD_POID POID [0] 0.0.0.1 /dd/fields 0 0
0 PIN_FLD_FIELD ARRAY [0]
1 PIN_FLD_DESCR STR [0] "custom field for holding a VAT number"
1 PIN_FLD_FIELD_NAME STR [0] "C_FLD_VAT_NUMBER"
1 PIN_FLD_FIELD_NUM ENUM [0] 10000
1 PIN_FLD_FIELD_TYPE INT [0] 5
Let's verify the field we created exists in the database data dictionary by feeding the following input flist to PCM_OP_SDK_GET_FLD_SPECS opcode:
0 PIN_FLD_POID POID [0] 0.0.0.1 /dd/objects 0 0
0 PIN_FLD_FIELD ARRAY [0]
1 PIN_FLD_FIELD_NAME STR [0] "C_FLD_VAT_NUMBER"
Editing the Custom Field Description
Now that we have confirmed that the new custom field exists, we can change the description,by calling PCM_OP_SDK_SET_FLD_SPECS opcode with the following input flist:
0 PIN_FLD_POID POID [0] 0.0.0.1 /dd/fields 0 0
0 PIN_FLD_FIELD ARRAY [0]
1 PIN_FLD_DESCR STR [0] "custom field - VAT number"
1 PIN_FLD_FIELD_NAME STR [0] "C_FLD_VAT_NUMBER"
1 PIN_FLD_FIELD_NUM ENUM [0] 10000
1 PIN_FLD_FIELD_TYPE INT [0] 5
Again, we can retrieve the field's specifications to verify the change has been made.
To get know how to delete and make the custom fields, please read part 2: “Oracle BRM and Custom Fields- Part 2".
