Understanding Common Lookups in Oracle HCM
The HR department has to maintain personal, legislation-specific, and organization-related data for all employees in their HR applications. It is crucial to properly manage and store this data as it will be used for reporting. Furthermore, other applications like payroll and outbound interfaces will also use this data.
Oracle HCM Cloud offers all such data fields and their values out of the box, which helps customers adhere to the legislative rules and properly maintain the data. Oracle offers its customers the flexibility to manage values for these data fields by using the functionality of lookups.
Lookups list values that appear for various fields within an application.
There are three categories of lookups:
- Standard lookups
- Common lookups
- Set-enabled lookups
What are the Common Lookups in Oracle HCM?
Here are some essential details about common lookups.
Common lookups are predefined lookups allowing users to add new values or enable/disable existing ones. Admin users generally maintain these.
To enter a value for the fields within the application, a user can select any of the values from the available list. There are predefined lookup types available for various areas in the application.
For example, ‘Assignment Category’ is one of the fields on the employee’s assignment screen that contains a list of values. The list of weights that appear for this field comes from lookup. The lookup type for this is ‘EMP_CAT’.
Duplicate lookup codes are not allowed in the lookup type.
Lookup Customization
Oracle Fusion contains certain predefined lookups you cannot disable values for or add new deals to. However, a few lookups allow you to disable values and add some new ones. So, it all depends on the lookup configuration level, as it helps you check what level of customization is possible for a lookup type.
There are three different types of common lookups available in Oracle Fusion that decide the customization for the lookup:
- User lookup — This is a flexible type of lookup; you can add new values and enable/disable existing ones.
- Extensible lookup — In this type of lookup, you can add new values but cannot disable existing ones.
- System lookup — System lookup does not allow you to add or disable the existing values.
Lookup Type and Its Components
Lookup Type — Here, you can add values to the lookup. Note that this field name will appear on the setup screen and not on the application screen, where users usually make an entry into the application.
Meaning — This is the name of the field that users will see on the screen, where they will add the value.
Module — This is the name of the module to which this lookup belongs. It might be named HR or Absence.
Lookup Configuration level — As explained in the above section, lookup configuration has three values:
- User
- Extensible
- System
We can add values, known as lookup codes, in each lookup type.
The lookup codes consist of:
Lookup Code — This signifies the value of each code we have added. It is not visible to the users, but it is used to uniquely identify values added into the lookup type.
Display Sequence — This is used to mention the sequence of values they should appear in for the users to select. It can be 1, 2, 3, etc.
Enabled — The checkbox helps you to enable or disable any particular lookup code.
Start Date and End Date — You can specify a date range for each lookup code to make it available only within that range for users to select. If this is left blank, then it is always available for users.
Meaning — This term will appear in the list of values on the UI for a specific field, which the user can see and select from the drop-down menu. It is associated with the lookup code.
Tag — Tag is used for localizing the lookup code. For example, if we put +GB as Tag, this value will appear only for Great Britain localization; if we put –GB, then it will not appear for Great Britain. If we leave this blank, it will appear for all areas.
You can create a new lookup type or enable/disable values by using the task under Setup and Maintenance -> Manage Common Lookups
Here is an example for lookup type ‘EMP_CAT’:
Business Case
If any customer based in GB wants to enable the ‘Transgender’ value for ‘Gender’, which is already present in the lookup type, they can navigate to the Manage Common lookups task. Since the lookup type for Gender is ‘Sex’, select the value ‘Transgender’ in the lookup codes section, and in the tag column, enter ‘+GB’. Click on Save and Close.
To get all details of lookups in the application, use the below query:
Select * from hcm_lookups;
So, this is how common lookups in Oracle HCM capture information for employees and provide the flexibility to manage value in these data fields.
Note: This article was originally published on Evosys -https://www.evosysglobal.com/blog/common-lookups-in-oracle-hcm
