Extending Oracle eBS R12 using Oracle APEX

Oracle E-Business Suite delivers a wide range of functionality to handle core areas of your business processing needs. However, there are situations where you want to extend your information systems beyond the range of Oracle E-Business Suite. Many times these necessary extensions are meant to handle unique industry conventions, specific customer requirements, or perhaps to offer some other competitive edge. Sometimes these change requests are simple enough, but other times more extensive customizations are needed. In these scenarios, Oracle Application Express, also known as Oracle APEX, provides an easy way to create supplemental applications that are easily integrated with your Oracle E-Business Suite and its data.

Oracle Application Express (APEX):

Is a rapid web application development tool for the Oracle database
Combines the qualities of a personal database (productivity, ease of use, and flexibility) with the qualities of an enterprise database (security, integrity, performance, scalability, availability, and built for the web).
The browser based interface, declarative programming framework, and simple wizards make Oracle Application Express easy to learn and enable you to quickly build robust applications.
No license fees for APEX itself, however
- When fully integrated in Oracle E-Business Suite (same database) an Oracle E-Business Suite limited-use license is not sufficient (no rights to make changes to the database)
- An additional application server is needed, which will not be totally without costs (may be a license fee, but surely costs to manage)

For one of our Dutch customers, Capgemini extended their Oracle E-Business Suite R12 implementation with some APEX pages. The APEX pages are fully integrated. That is:

The APEX pages are accessible via the regular eBS menus that users are used to work with
The APEX pages look like the self-service pages in eBS R12. This has been managed by choosing the right theme (Legacy theme ‘Traditional Blue’; Theme 20) and adding / changing some elements in the editable template.

Pure Traditional Blue:

Traditional Blue plus customized template:

Pressing the submit button on the APEX page shown above will upload the file plus submit a job (concurrent process ) in Oracle eBS itself and return the request id. So, the Excel file uploaded is processed in Oracle eBS immediately.
There is also an APEX page where to download the Excel file uploaded, just by clicking on the filename. This APEX page is of type ‘Interactive Report’ and has standard a lot of filtering and sorting options that comes along with this type of APEX pages.