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Integrating a Custom Form with Banner 7

Fri, 2007-04-20 10:14 — rickl

Hi, I'm a long time Forms Developer with Oracle Applications but new to Banner. Does Banner documentation exist that explains how to integrate a new custom form with Banner? Please share document location if it exists.

Some questions that come to mind are:

1. Should I start with a template form or should I start from scratch?
2. If starting from scratch are there specific libraries(pll's) and forms(fmb's) that I should include with my custom form?
3. How do I register a new Form with Banner so that users have access from the menu?
4. What about Banner security? How to authenticate Banner login/passwords?
5. What about compiling Forms within the Oracle Forms Developer tool and testing via OC4J? Any problems there?
6. How to achieve the Banner "look and feel" with a new form?
7. Once form is developed how do I generate the new form on Linux and get it to the Production directory?

Thanks,
Rick

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Fri, 2007-04-20 17:03 — lmolmen

Integrating a Custom Form with Banner 7

Hi Rick,

I'm no pro at this but have worked through the process a few times. Hope this helps:

1. We generally try to pick a form that's similar to what we want and modify it.

2. See #1

3. Add the form to Banner Security, then add a record to GUAOBJS. Of course you need to have the compiled (.fmx) file in the right place too. I'm not sure how you add a form to the Banner menus - maybe someone else can help with this.

4. There is a library procedure typically run by when-new-form-instance triggers that validates the user's form security each time the form is opened.

5. We generally compile using the Oracle Forms Compiler. I'm not sure how to answer your OC4J question...

6. We relied heavily on the Forms 7x UI Methodology Handbook published by Sungard for this, going from 6.x to 7.x especially.

7. The "on Linux" part I'm not yet familiar with, as we've just moved from UNIX to Linux ourselves...but generally we copy from Sungard's batch compile scripts if we are compiling from a host prompt. Mostly I put the .fmb file in our winfmb directory, compile it, then move the .fmx to the directory it's supposed to run from.

Oh, one more thing. It's best to be connected to your database in Oracle Forms Developer before you open a form - otherwise the libraries are all detached, and you will cause yourself grief if you save it like that. At times we've had library errors that are just solved by manually detaching and reattaching the libraries.

Best wishes,

Lisa

Mon, 2007-04-23 15:10 — rickl

Integrating a Custon Form with Banner 7

Thanks Lisa! That helps a lot!!

Tue, 2007-05-08 23:50 — vpatel

Use skeleton provided by SCT

It is always a good idea to start new custom form from skeleton provided by SCT. I think they are located in general/form/*skel.fmb. There are three file one for validation form, one for application form and one for inquiry form.
Vipul Patel
Senior Enterprise Resource Plng Developer
The George Washington University
ISS/AdminApps/BannerApps
vpatel@gwu.edu

Thu, 2008-05-15 12:22 — lmayforth

Banner Global Variables and GUAINIT

When I try debugging a custom Banner form using Oracles Forms, it wants a lot of global variables that I think are coming from guainit. This is a problem for this form because you need to know the values of these variables. Has anyone worked through this?