Saturday, November 22, 2014

Intro to Service Contracts Import Program

Before release of EBS 12.1 there was no supported way to import contracts into the EBS Service Contracts application - there were no public APIs nor contract load programs provided.  From release 12.1 onwards the 'Service Contracts Import Program' is provided to load service contracts into the application. This note explains the program architecture and details the interface table definitions.


Contracts Import Program Architecture
The Service Contract Import program takes data from the following interface tables and populates the contracts tables upon successful run. 
  • OKS_HEADERS_INTERFACE :- Hold contract header level data like Vendor, Customer etc..
  • OKS_LINES_INTERFACE :- Hold line level details like Service, Coverage etc..
  • OKS_COVERED_LEVELS_INTERFACE :- Hold subline level details like covered item / product / customer etc…
  • OKS_SALES_CREDITS_INTERFACE :- Hold sales credit information related to contract.
  • OKS_USAGE_COUNTERS_INTERFACE :- For usage contract, it holds the usage related data.
  • OKS_NOTES_INTERFACE :- Hold additional information ie. Notes
These interface tables has be populated via a custom load program with proper value. If values are not correct contract will not be imported. The Service Contract Import program has following parameters :- 

Parameter Description
Mode Validate Only – Validate the data in interface table before we run import
Import – Import the record to service contract.
Batch Number oks_headers_interface.batch_id
Number of Worker Spawned subrequests, use full when processing large number of records.
Commit Size Number of successful records committed to database

The service contract import program spawns sub-requests for the import worker(s) and the 'Service Contracts Import Report'.  The data is validated before its imported into the Contracts tables and will report success/errors in the Service Contracts Import Report program output file (Import Execution Report). 

After contract is successfully imported, you can purge the records from the interface tables by running the Service Contracts Import Purge concurrent program. Note that currently there is no supported way to mass delete data from the Contracts schema tables once they are populated, so data loaded by the Import program must be fully tested and verified before the program is run to load data into a Production system.

A Service Contracts Import Test program has been provided which will take an existing contract in the application and load the interface tables using the data from that contract.  This can be used as an example for guidance on how to load the interface tables. Note that the Test program has some limitations which do not apply to the full Import program and is not a supported program, it is simply a testing tool.

For additional details please refer to following links :-
Reference :- Lucia C Blog

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