PeopleTools Grid Controls and Subpages

I had the situation today where I needed to change the column header in a grid on a subpage via PeopleCode. I tried adding the following to the PageActivate PeopleCode on the subpage:

GetGrid(Page.PS_Subpage, "GridName").ColumnName.Label = "MyNewColumnName";

I kept receiving an error that the grid could not be found on the page. I thought that was interesting, double-checked my code to verify that I didn't have any typos and tried again. Same error. It then occurred to me that maybe the processor doesn't interpret subpages as a different page object. I changed my code to reference the page that was hosting the subpage...

GetGrid(Page.PS_HostPage, "GridName(from subpage)").ColumnName.Label = "MyNewColumnName";

... and my code started working.

We still have the 8.46 toolset, so this might not be an issue with newer versions of PeopleTools.

PeopleTools: How-To rename table names on a page via SQL

I have frequently run into the situation when cloning a page where you want to rename a table on a page, but want to keep all field properties the same (ie, custom label, fieldname, etc.). In PeopleTools, when you change the record name on a field, all of the properties get wiped out, so you end up doing a lot of unnecessary cutting and pasting to reset all of the properties. A better way of doing this is to just update the page record directly via SQL:

update pspnlfield set recname = :newrec where pnlname = :pagename and recname = oldrec;

Best Practice Center: PeopleSoft and Oracle Fusion Middleware

Here is a link to a site that Oracle recently brought up regarding best practices for integrating PeopleSoft and Oracle Fusion Middleware:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/fmw4apps/peoplesoft/index.html?msgid=6476729

PeopleTools 8.46 and Microsoft Windows Vista SP1

As luck would have it, my Windows XP drive took a dive earlier this week. Rather than wasting a lot of time figuring out what the problem is, I thought it would be better to put my Windows Vista drive back into my laptop and keep working. I built a disk image of Windows Vista Enterprise a couple of months ago, but switched back to Windows XP around the end of January (for no reason... really...). With all of the recent hoopla about Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista, I thought it was a good time to give it another shot. I loaded the drive back into the laptop, fired it up, got all of the Windows Updates (20+), all of my open-source software was updated (Notepad++, Firefox, WinMerge, Tortoise SVN, Filezilla all had multiple releases since the end of January) and then I did Service Pack 1. It loaded without error, though the suggested load time message from Microsoft of an hour plus was more like 2 hours plus.

We are still running PeopleTools 8.46 here and yes, I know 8.46 is not officially supported by Oracle on Windows Vista. That being said, I haven't run into any problems running 8.46 on Vista. There are the occasional crashes, which aren't any more or less frequent than they are in Windows XP. One thing I have noticed though since Vista SP1 is that the PeopleSoft Query window in two-tier (I am old-school and like the two-tier query interface) keeps crashing with a "Out Of Memory" error. I have checked each time and I still have about 900 megs of physical memory left, but the error is still showing up.

Not that this is a huge issue, just wanted to document it somewhere. I might be the only person on the planet trying to write a query on PeopleTools 8.46 in two-tier mode on Windows Vista SP1. If there is someone else out there with the same issue, you are not alone... ;-)