We had an interesting "Ask the Experts" question yesterday about how to disable the PeopleSoft page bar across the entire system. The page bar is what has the "New Window", "Customize Page", and "Copy URL to clipboard" links in it.



There is a personalization setting for the "Customize Page" link that can be defaulted completely off at the system level, but the other options can only be turned off by going into each component and changing these properties. Financials 8.9 has 6723 components in it. Not something that you want to do one at time, especially since changing these settings is technically a customization.

One potential workaround to this is to just use SQL and update the component properties manually, but you generally don't want to muck around with making direct updates to the PeopleTools tables (and you're still customizing a ton of objects - you're just doing it faster).

The other potential workaround that can be used still involves a customization, but a less invasive one. It involves using a little CSS to hide the page bar. This one line of JavaScript will do the trick.

document.write("<style>#PAGEBAR { display: none; }</style>");

If you put this into one of the delivered JavaScript programs that is added to every page (which is a customization), then you'll be set.

Note that you haven't actually disabled this functionality, just hidden it. So if you're really desperate to keep people from using the pagebar, then you will have to disable it on each component so that the backend knows that it's disabled as well.

Labels: PeopleCode, Security, User

David Kurtz has a good tip on his weblog about how to get rid of an annoying little bug in the index management in Application Designer. David knows what annoys DBAs about PeopleSoft - he wrote the book on it (literally).

The underlying source of the problem has to do with the fact that some of the internal PeopleTools code still thinks that it is supporting some platforms that are actually not supported (Allbase!).

The problem of code cruft in PeopleTools is actually something that I've had in my list of blog topics to write about for awhile, but it'll have to stay in the queue a bit longer. For now, check out David's post for how to make Application Designer behave :-)

Labels: Database, Performance

Last week, we had a great trip to the Washington, DC / Richmond, VA area. We had lots of meetings with PeopleSoft customers, helped many of them with some of their PeopleSoft issues, and got lots of great ideas for new products.

Presentation
For those who are interested in looking at the PowerPoint presentation I gave, here's a link to download it. The presentation covered the following topics:

• Adding hyperlinks to your reports (one of our favorite BLOG entries)
• Adding Security to your reports (another favorite)
• Creating production job streams for your reports using process scheduler

Report Validation, Analysis, and Balancing

We had several customers express interest in us building a product for Report Validation, Analysis, and Balancing. This product would address significant business and compliance needs by automating:

• The validation and analysis of similar reports in your system (across different formats and reporting tools)
• The balancing of reports in your system (to ensure that you're reporting accurately across the different parts of your business)
• The tying out of numbers across systems, such as validating numbers in EPM against the source systems, or validating your numbers in an upgrade.

Due to the interest from customers, we expect to have the product ready in September. If you are interested in the product and would like to work with us as an early adopter, contact us at ReportBalancingProgram@GreySparling.com.

Labels: Drilling, nVision