At RECONNECT 20, during the PeopleSoft Rock Stars Podcast, Jim Marion, Master Trainer at JSMpros, and Gusty Toluta’u, Director of Development at Gideon Taylor, were interviewed by Paul Taylor, President and CEO at Gideon Taylor. The rock stars fielded listener-submitted questions, as well as canned inquiries regarding Fluid Development.

About The Rock Stars

To introduce the guests, Jim Marion is a PeopleSoft legend. Many people who work in the PeopleSoft industry have learned their trade from his books, blog, vlog, training classes, or by connecting with him in a session. He is a full-time PeopleTools instructor, the co-author of three PeopleTools books, and has been a part of the PeopleSoft community for almost two decades. He is a former Oracle employee.

Gusty Toluta’u of Gideon Taylor has a lifetime of experience with PeopleSoft. He has achieved some crazy things, including developing the most robust and complex Fluid application in the PeopleSoft ecosystem, according to Paul Taylor. Gusty has been on the ground, in the trenches, doing Fluid development for years.

During the podcast, Paul introduced his guests with quick facts about them, including that Gusty was once surrounded by a pod of surfacing humpback whales while kayaking in the ocean. Jim used to be a firefighter, and he has a 17-year gap between his oldest and youngest child. As soon as the questions began rolling in, the rock stars offered solutions.

Let’s Talk About Fluid Development

Q1: We are soon to be on PT 8.58. As we develop new bolt-on components and applications, should we be developing Fluid pages, or should we continue to develop bolt-ons as Classic pages?

Jim: That’s a great question. The answer is, It depends.

Oracle’s strategic direction is Fluid, so if you want to follow suit in doing what Oracle is doing, you should go Fluid. However, the reality is that over 90 percent of HR is still Classic. If your bolt-on is going to be used by back-office people, the chances are that their entire user experience is Classic. If this is the case, why give them one piece of Fluid when the other 99 percent is going to be Classic. Furthermore, Classic is easier to do. You will be done faster with Classic.

Personally, I would develop everything today and going forward in Fluid because it is a lot more flexible. It’s Oracle’s strategic direction.

Gusty: Building on Jim’s answer, you’ll want to look at the type of user who will be using the bolt-on. In Classic, a lot of the pages are intended for a superuser who can see all of the fields and options on the page and know which ones to update, whereas Fluid is a guided, simplified user interface and flow.

The other thing to consider is how the user will be navigating to your page. Will they be going through self-service? An activity guide? Using a related action from an existing page in PeopleSoft? Think through this flow.

Q2: Why do you need to learn Fluid Development? Specifically, what are the benefits of Fluid development?

Gusty: Fluid is definitely a more modern user interface. It gets you closer to modern web developments. In Classic, you could just rely on PeopleSoft to generate HTML for you. With Fluid, you are pushed into the space where you need to look at the HTML being rendered to make it more flexible. If you are wanting to help your resources move into modern standards and approaches for applications, Fluid can be a good strategy.

Jim: Everything you can do in Fluid, you can do Classic. It’s just a lot harder in Classic. Fluid is more flexible. While Fluid is more work to get the baseline, the final 5 percent of work is more flexible for Fluid than Classic.

Furthermore, Fluid is Oracle’s strategic direction. Most people have PeopleSoft because it is the most flexible ERP system in the world. They want to know how Oracle’s delivered content works so that they can transform it and align it with their business processes. Fluid is Oracle’s choice.

Paul: Fluid has a responsive design that allows the page to adjust to the size of the screen it is given. The strategy is to present content that can be consumed on a mobile device readily. To Jim’s point, you can do that without Fluid, but once that becomes the goal, Fluid is actually the faster way to achieve it.

Q3: One big issue in going to Fluid for our users involves a grid within a grid or scroll area. It is not displaying with edit capability well or even at all. Any thoughts or tips on how to address this?

Gusty: With our product, we did have to go to level 2 and level 3 with scroll areas and grids. Sometimes it did feel like we were getting into uncharted territory. While Oracle intends for Fluid to be a more simplified user experience, they don’t recommend creating a Classic page exactly the same in Fluid. It is not intended to be a replacement for super users.

Some of Jim’s blog entries have shown taking a typical grid structure and changing the layout to a repeating area with content in more a vertical list than a horizontal table. That styling can help as you aim for the ability to edit with simpler usability.

Jim: Specific to grid inside a scroll area, if you look at Oracle delivered Fluid pages, you will find tons of grids. You will not find scroll areas. They are not using them anymore. When they have to go multi-level, you usually see a second page for editing capabilities. Can you edit in a grid or scroll area? Yes. On the Use tab, check the layout options. Make sure they are set to flex grid if you are Fluid. That will be your standard in-line editable grid.

Scroll areas— the key problem is that scroll areas don’t include your usual scroll area buttons. You have to add those yourself. For example, paging forward and backward through scroll areas must be added. It does work like Classic in the end. However, it shouldn’t. As Gusty mentioned, you should not be developing Fluid with Classic in mind. Oracle has a document called PeopleSoft Fluid UX Design Standards which will walk you through the different grid options. The in-line editable grid is listed in there. In the doc, it says you can still do it, but it is discouraged.

Q4: Should we also spend time to learn CSS and JavaScript?

Jim: When the tools team began talking about Fluid, they specifically said to train developers on Java, CSS, and HTML. While that does help, it should not be the focus. In fact, it can get us into trouble when we take the web developer’s perspective while building Fluid solutions. Oracle has delivered a Fluid framework that we can build off of without knowing any CSS. I discourage people from writing CSS because it is written based on the current understanding of PeopleTools. If you write for 8.57, you may have to revisit it in 8.58. Additionally, there is often an Oracle delivered solution that is compatible, upgrades nicely, and is maintained by Oracle. You and I are better served by knowing the Oracle delivered style classes than by learning CSS— but you should still learn CSS.

Gusty: As you look at the CSS guide, be careful copying and pasting style names from the pdf. Formatting will change hyphens to dashes. The browser developer tools make it easy to make changes and to see them on your page as you test style changes, etc. If you look at the source for the CSS, as pulled up in the browser development tools, you can quickly find style events.

Q5: When you say Fluid development, would it be enough to understand page composers and development registrations? What is the minimum requirement to be Fluid development-ready?

Jim: Developer Registration and Page Composer both refer to Fluid Approvals Page Composer. I will tell you that learning, understanding, and using developer registration for Fluid approvals page composer is horrendous. It was not intended for us, as developers. It was intended for internal Oracle use only. The problem with that approach is that it’s the only way to get an approval into the Fluid approvals tile. If you are developing custom approvals, you have to do that to get it to show.

The main problem is that Fluid Approvals Page Composer only deals with approvals. There is so much more to bolt-ons than approvals. The Fluid forms and approvals builder could be used, but it’s light in its capabilities.

This points to a gap in PeopleTools.

Paul: If you want to end up with Fluid applications without doing Fluid development, especially if you want them to be workflow-enabled and included in the Fluid approval process without having to undergo Page Composer shenanigans, GTE forms for PeopleSoft is a great route to take. Gusty was the lead developer for these. The product is in PeopleSoft and allows you to use configuration to set up a Fluid application. The best way to develop Fluid applications is not to develop them, but to configure them.

Gusty: To add, Page Composer is a display-only view of a transaction. You cannot edit transactions this way. Our product is different in that we integrate with workflow engine, but you can also edit transactions as it goes through the workflow.

Q6: Can you self-train on Fluid? What is the benefit of guided training classes?

Gusty: I did not go through training to scale up on Fluid. I dug into PeopleBooks and went through a ton of trial and error. This was three years ago. I’m sad that I didn’t have Jim’s books to go through. I think I would have a much stronger foundation and increased knowledge had I utilized his books.

Jim: Absolutely, you can self-train. The problem is that Oracle did not deliver any simple Fluid pages. They are incredibly complicated and a lot of it includes PeopleCode. In fact, if you are developing for mobile, I guarantee you are going to be writing PeopleCode, or adaptive design. Most of the PeopleCode is wrapped up in hierarchal application classes. You can self-learn, but it is very hard.

Recently, a customer mentioned that you can learn it the hard way, or you can learn it the easy way, which is to take Jim’s classes. Those who self-train on Fluid work harder than is necessary. They copy what Oracle has delivered without the understanding of why they do what they do. They may not even have style sheets for doing what they saw from Oracle.

The quality of the Fluid training is extremely important. While I don’t like to talk about this because it sounds like I’m bragging, I recently overheard a customer claiming he had learned more from my classes than multiple trainings from other individuals.

Q7: What are some examples of Fluid functions being used in PeopleCode?

Gusty: Your data structure in Classic pages continues in Fluid. You will need to add styles, as well.