Designing an Application

Designing An ApplicationChapter 2: Understanding The Development Process

Chapter 2Understanding The Development Process

This is an introduction into the development process for making modifications to the PeopleSoft application.

Chapter Objectives

This chapter provides:

Elements of an Application
The Development Process
Introduction of the Application Designer

Chapter Contents

This chapter contains the following items:

Elements of an Application...... 2

Steps in the Development Process...... 4

TheApplication Designer...... 6

Elements of an Application

The application is made up of many elements that are used in the development process.

For modifications to the application it is crucial to know the names of the component and pages you are working with. To ascertain the names of fields and records will take more investigation into the pages where they reside. These will be found by using the Application Designer.

Other notable elements

There are other elements to a page construct that are helpful to know when determining the scope of the development that is being requested.

Check Boxes

Generally, check boxes signify a field that will only hold two values, not necessarily a YES/NO field.

Drop Down

Drop down boxes will indicate that a translate value is attached to the field. Changing values to a drop down will normally take a developer to make the modification.

Prompt Buttons

Prompt buttons will validate against values that exist in another database table. These types of changes normally do not take a design change. The prompt table may or may not be accessible for the business analyst to make the changes.

Steps in the Development Process

Software Development Life Cycle

The software development life cycle model describes the stages involved in an information system development project that takes the modifications from identifying business needs through maintaining/upgrading the software.

Making modifications to the PeopleSoft application will require most or all of the following steps

Design the customization
Create Field Definitions
Create Record Definitions
Build the physical database table
Create Pages
Create Components
Register Component
Test the modification

Design the Customization

Create a complete plan for development. In order to minimize unnecessary changes and get the most from development resources, a thorough business requirements document should be created. This will determine what types of database objects need to be created/modified, placement in the menu, as well as security necessary to access.

Create Field Definitions

Create and/or modify any field definitions that are needed for the modifications. Fields are defined as a stand-alone entity not attached to any record definition. This allows them to participate in separate record definitions. Some of the different attributes of a field definition include field type (character, number, date), field length, default field labels, valid values for the field, etc.

Create Record Definitions

Create and/or modify any record definitions that are needed for the modifications. This step will associate any field definitions to a record definition, as well as characteristics of how the record is used in the system.

Build Physical Database Tables

Once the Record definition is created, the underlying database table must be built. The build process takes the record definition and its properties and creates a database table to house the application data. Normally, this step will be performed by the database administrator.

Create Pages

The PeopleSoft page is the graphical representation used to display the data to the user. This step will add page controls for the layout of the data, as well as associating which record field definitions will be involved.

Create Component

The component element is considered the business transaction within PeopleSoft and is essential in maintaining the navigational and security aspect of the system. Components contain one or more pages that users can navigate with tabs and/or links. This step will also determine search capabilities, processing mode, and toolbar buttons.

Register Component

PeopleSoft delivers a registration wizard to attach the component to a menu, grant security access, as well as make the navigational links to the portal registry. Once this step is done, the component is available in the application to be utilized.

Test the Modification

The final step of development is testing of the modification. A thorough testing plan should be created and implemented that will test all aspects of the modification before making it available to production. As problems occur with testing, reiterate the development cycle to resolve them.

The Application Designer

PeopleSoft’s Application Designer is the core tool used to make modifications to the application. It enables changes to many of the definitions used by PeopleSoft, including.

Fields
Records (Tables)
Pages
Components
Menus
PeopleCode (PeopleSoft’s Programming Language)

The elements of the application designer include:

Title Bar (display current project and active definition)
Menu (access designer commands and features)
Toolbar (useful buttons for editing active definitions)
Project Window (Graphical representation of project components)

Projects are an efficient way of organizing development objects and is essential for the purpose of migrating between databases.

Definition Window (displays individual definitions)
Output Window (Contains output text from designer operations, such as Table Builds, Find Definition results, Validations)

Examples of viewing PeopleSoft Definitions

Field Definition

Record Definition

Page Definition

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and Arizona State University