As part of Quest’s PeopleSoft Week 2020, Matthew Haavisto, Product Management Director at Oracle, spoke about how to leverage tools like Event Mapping and Drop Zones to isolate customizations in your PeopleSoft system.

5 Major PeopleSoft Initiatives

As you may be familiar with, the major initiatives of PeopleSoft aim to:

• Migrate to the Oracle Cloud for lower cost
• Prepare to adopt new technology
• Isolate customizations to make applying changes easier
• Optimize the user experience to make users more productive
• Automate lifecycle processes to make the adoption of new features easier

Benefits of Isolating Customizations

Haavisto’s presentation focused on how to isolate customizations. The primary benefit of isolating customizations can best be appreciated in the lifecycle process of adopting new Images. As customers take advantage of isolation tools such as Event Mapping, Application Engine plug-ins, and Drop Zones, updates and new Image uptake will occur faster and with greater efficiency.

PeopleSoft’s goal is to empower customers to continue using the customizations they rely on for their businesses while diminishing the cost and effort required to do so. In short, the user should be able to retain important customizations and minimize the change impact at Image uptake. The PeopleSoft team highly recommends isolating customizations when you are making new changes. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What can we eliminate or retire?
• What has been replaced by the delivered product?
• What changes are essential?

3 Approaches to Isolating Customizations

There are three main approaches that help you isolate customizations:

1. Big bang
2. Incremental
3. Cherry-picking

The big bang approach is a one-time effort to isolate as many customizations as possible. It uses Event Mapping, Drop Zones, and Page and Field Configurator to the fullest extent. You should plan for at least 80 percent isolation with the big bang.

The second approach is an incremental one. Migrate customization when it shows as a conflict in a change assistant compare report. Over time, product areas will be returned to generic. Plan time in each PUM cycle.

Finally, cherry-picking is the approach of identifying your most important customizations and addressing them first.

Once again, the key point is to invest in isolation now for big savings in the future.

Available Tools to Help Isolate Customizations

There are a number of tools available to help users isolate customizations in their PeopleSoft systems, including Event Mapping, Drop Zones, and Application Engine action plug-ins.

Event Mapping lets you write AppClass custom code that you can run before or after delivery of PeopleSoft events. It gives you complete access to the Component Buffer and is assigned through the existing Related Content framework. This is what allows it to be isolated from the delivered code. This was first introduced in PeopleTools 8.55. PeopleSoft recommends using PeopleTools 8.56 or later because there were some enhancements made that are very beneficial.

Drop Zones were introduced in PeopleTools 8.57. They are areas on Fluid pages that will be bypassed by standard LCM compare processes. Drop Zones utilize the framework to add custom fields that are only used for customizations.

Application Engine action plug-ins were introduced in PeopleTools 8.58. They are similar to Event Mapping but apply to batch processes. They allow you to alter SQL or PeopleCode actions of any Application Engine program. They are similar to Event Mapping for transactional processing.

Event Mapping

Event Mapping allows logic changes. Custom PeopleCode is kept separate from the delivered code. It offers complete access to the Component Buffer. There is a growing list of events available, as displayed below:

It is beneficial to keep in mind that this is PeopleCode only and component-based PeopleCode. It is not object-oriented, meaning it is injected and run before or after. You can’t change any delivery PeopleCode. Lifecycle Tools are not currently Event Map aware.

Some of the new Event Mapping features include:

• Broader support for Event Mapping with Drop Zones for data privacy and more
• Support for additional events
• FieldDefault, FieldEdit, SearchInit, and SearchSave
• SearchInit and SearchSave events can be used for component records
• Support for records and record fields on subpages and secondary pages at any level of nesting, not just for primary pages explicitly defined in the component
• Extended support to the page activate event for secondary pages and to derived/work records

Application Engine Plug-Ins

App Engine plug-ins are for batch logic. They are similar to Event Mapping for transactional processing. They alter SQL or PeopleCode actions of Application Engine programs. The modification of Application Engine programs will not cause any disruption when you decide to upgrade to a new Image. Actions belonging to the same step of the same section can have multiple plug-in actions defined.

You can decide in which order to perform the actions that you add or replace, as well as the sequence in which the actions belonging to the same step of the same section run during execution. You can even replace delivery actions.

Drop Zones

Drop Zones are data and page changes. Primarily used for fields, you can also utilize Drop Zones for widgets, labels, and more. Essentially, Drop Zones allow you to add fields without impacting the lifecycle. Within the Drop Zone, you have the full power of PeopleTools. This feature was originally introduced for Fluid pages only, but PeopleTools 8.58 provides Drop Zone support for Classic pages.

Consider that Drop Zones are applied by developers. They do not reduce implementation or customization time. The real benefit is that you do not have to reimplement during an Image update. Unfortunately, some pages do not work with Drop Zones at this time. Additionally, it is important to only use PeopleSoft-delivered Drop Zones in order for them to remain unchanged at Image update.

Drop Zones are delivered in PeopleSoft applications, and the customer can extend the page content. This enables customers to add fields that are displayed and processed on delivered fluid pages without customization.

Your subpage is inserted dynamically at runtime. End users will not be able to distinguish your subpage from PeopleSoft delivered content. It will not affect Image uptake.

Considerations for Isolating Customizations

When working to isolate customizations, be aware that you are migrating through related content and projects. Keep track of all Event Mapping as part of your change management/LCM (debugging and applying maintenance must still be considered). Realize that the tools available will not cover 100 percent of customizations. The primary goal is to simplify maintenance and reduce cost and effort on uptake of new Images.

What’s on the Horizon

Event Mapping will have an improved user interface with the ability to replace or override a delivered event. It will also be possible to execute custom code when the event’s PeopleCode is empty. Additionally, Drop Zones configuration data access API and multi-component selection during subpage configuration are currently being worked on.

According to a PeopleSoft focus group, one major area in need of improvement is that of managing change. PeopleSoft is working to find solutions that will help you track and deal with changes.

To learn more about how to leverage these tools to isolate customizations in your PeopleSoft system, check out the PeopleSoft Week presentation and additional resources attached below.