Stu's Braindump

The "My Oracle Support" Community Customer Care and Billing page is now available at https://communities.oracle.com/portal/server.pt/community/customer_care_and_billing for all registered "My Oracle Support" users.

Oracle Utilities Framework 2.2.0 SP6 (Patch number 9042811) and Customer Care & Billing 2.2.0 SP6 (Patch number 9042819) are now available for download from My Oracle Support. 

A couple of handy My Oracle Support (Metalink) links for TUGBU customers... ID 804664.1 - Important Patches for Customer Care & Billing V2.1.0 ID 804612.1 - Important Patches for Customer Care & Billing V2.2.0 ID 804706.1 - Important Patches for Enterprise Taxation Management V2.1.5

I have generated the following slide in an attempt to ease some of the confusion around what each of the various budget subsystems does in CC&B. It should be noted that in the past we have 'enhanced' the Direct Debit extract to ensure that the balance left on the account at due date is not collected from customers bank accounts when they have specific types of NBB plans in force, this allows us to configure both Balance-on-due-date and Bill-smoothing type structures within the NBB subsystem. As can be seen from this table, there is no single plan type which will cater for all permutations of a clients payment offerings, and as a result most implementations make use of a combination of these components to deliver the required functionality. (edit: minor update to reflect the fact that Payment Plan entries are not deleted once they are proceesed, where-as NBB entries are).

Changing the System Date in CC&B (to cater for testing requirements where the system has to be artificially rolled backwards/forwards) used to be done via the Database initialisation parameters, and the Batch Run Date parameter. But it appears that FEATURE CONFIGURATION now supports this requirement. Simply create a "General System Configuration" Feature Configuration instance (we tend to call ours CMTIMETRAVEL, but there is no restriction on this in the system), and define Option "System Override Date" with the required value. Once again, be aware that it is not recommended that you roll your dates back and forward, since this makes investigation of defects a bit more complicated, but it definitely has its place in relation to test execution (especially Collection and Severance testing, where the process runs across a large number of days and test cycles are typically defined for a much smaller period).

A quick update to include "Gaffen Central" in my links zone. Allan's Blog tends to focus on Technical Architect aspects of Oracle UGBU FW/CC&B installs & upgrades and his page is well worth a visit. I have also included a couple of RSS registration links for readers who would like to subscribe to my blog via RSS, and changed the Top Tags zone to make it a bit easier to read. Enjoy.

We have identified an issue with the use of bundling and UI Maps, whereby the resulting Bundle was wrapping the UI Map in a set of CDATA tags, but only after it had already removed all formatting from the source records, resulting in corruption of the UI Map HTML fragments. This has now been corrected by implementing Single Fix 8228025 on FW/CC&B 2.2.0. If you are using the Bundling subsystem in your implementation, I strongly recommend that you implement this patch.