Registering Data Source Views

When you register a data source view, you specify the content items that will be available for a specific display area of a bill. You must register views if you:

Before you can register a view, the status of the data source must be disabled.

To register a data source view:

Prerequisites

Selecting a View

To register a data source view for a data source, first identify the display area for the view, and click Register.

Then, use the search function to find the database view that you want to use as a source for content items. For each view, enter a description and display name for the view. Create a display name that easily identifies the source of the content items that can be selected from the view. Later, the template designer selects content items based on this view's display name.

Selecting Parameters

You can set parameters to retrieve specific values from the view when a bill is displayed at run time.

Select either Fixed Value or Transaction Attribute as a parameter type and click Go. Then select a database column and enter a value for this parameter. You can repeat the above steps to add more parameters.

For example, to have a view retrieve information associated with a particular customer, you can select the Fixed Value parameter type and the BILL_TO_CUSTOMER_NAME database column, and then enter the specific company name as the parameter value.

Or, to have a view retrieve information related to a transaction, you can select the Transaction Attribute parameter type and the CUSTOMER_TRX_ID database column, and then select the Transaction ID transaction attribute as the parameter value.

Available Parameters

For the Header and Footer, and Lines and Tax display areas, the available list of values for the Transaction Attribute parameter type includes all content items in the Invoice Header view of the Oracle Receivables data source, except for these attributes:

See: Oracle Receivables Content Items.

For the Details Page display area, the available list of values for Transaction Attribute parameter type includes:

Selecting Content Items from Views

From the list of columns in the Content Items section, select the columns that you want to be available as content items during template design.

You can select or deselect column names only if the data source for the view is disabled. The Oracle Receivables data source, however, is always enabled because it provides transaction information to BPA. You can access views and update content items even though this data source is enabled.

If a column name is already used as a content item in an existing template, then the check box is grayed out. To make the content item unavailable for template design, you must first delete the content item from all templates that use the content item. You can then deselect the column.

For each column, you can modify the default item name and item display label. BPA creates a description for each content item, using the following format:

Content item description = data source name-view display name-item name

The description appears in Template Management. It may be helpful to design a naming convention for data sources, views, and content items that easily identifies these components for your billing personnel.

Note: The Item Display Label can also be modified in Template Management. See: Updating Properties.

If you checked the Assignment Attribute checkbox against a content item from the Primary Data Source or header level flexfield content items from supplementary data source, it will be available as a template assignment attribute while creating template assignment rules.

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