Application Data Sets - All in One guide

ADS aka Application Data Sets

What is ADS?

    As the name clearly indicates, ADS is the collection of technology used to migrate application or configuration data between PeopleSoft Applications. Which has three main areas that you needs to understand before actually using it.

1. ADS Definitions - The data set itself that defines the shape of the data that you are planning to export and import between applications.
2. ADS Projects - An IDE project created using ADS definitions with/without criteria for filtering that contains the data
3. Data Migration Workbench - DMW in short, it's an IDE itself to help consultants and business to create, compare and copy projects (export and import)

    This gives business users a flexibility to define their data which needs to be managed (or moved) either during upgrades or implementation. Since the IDE is very well designed to meet the customer needs like filtering the set of data, comparing data (not objects) before import, checking the integrity, approval before data import and managing multiple ADS Projects.

Differentiating Factors

    You might think about the data migration tools you might have used earlier like Data Mover, Excel2CI or even SQL Scripts and question why would I need ADS when I already have prepared data and that I can use it for subsequent upgrades. Here I would like to list the key differentiating factors to convince you into use ADS.

• Everything can be managed at PIA level, no need to depend on technical skills
• Data comparison before the import, which can give you detailed compare of the data.
• Exported data is secured (encrypted) at the server level
• No need to update the script/file on every business case, create separate ADS projects
• Can work with different server architecture between your DEV and Prod as it is managed on the application level
• Can be extended for custom bolt-on modules as long as the data structure is clearly defined
• Provides Dataset Summary report and 10+ Administrator Reports
• Multiple projects can be imported at the same time

    What else do you require? think about the scenario where the customer is doing the testing of certain module which you implemented and they/you have added few more configurations as part of the testing/business requirement. Now they want you to do the same another refreshed instance, creating new script or Excel2CI template you can do for once or twice. Think the same happens on every few days/iterations and you keep doing the same work of updating the scripts or loading the data every time. With ADS Projects these can be done with one time ADS definition and ADS Project creation then just export and import via PIA. You can even give the export and import part to the business team as they become the owner of setup data and easy to move data between within non-production or to a production instance.

Key Benefits of ADS and What comes with Application Bundle

    As I explained the in the earlier section, many of the differentiating factors are actually the key benefits of ADS in your implementation life-cycle. More importantly PeopleSoft gives 100+ ADS definitions for the PeopleTools areas like Security, Activity Guide, Pivot Grids, BI Publisher and as well for the application specific data like Global Payroll, Time & Labour, Expenses etc.,

Some key ADS definitions for you (from HCM, FSCM applications),

• EOCC_CONFIGURATION - Page and Field Configurations
• EONC_NOTIFICATION_EVENTS - Notification Events
• WORKCENTER_CONFIGURATION - Work Center Configuration
• HC_AGC_TEMPLATES - AG Composer Templates
• HC_DIRECT_RPT_UI - Direct Reports Setup
• HC_TEXT_CATALOG - Text Catalog Configuration
• PSPRSM_CREF - Content Reference
• PTPPB_GROUPLET - Tile Wizard Tiles
• PTSF_KIBANA_DBOARD_DTL - Kibana Dashboards
• PT_SEC_PERSONALIZATIONS - Personalization's
• EXPRESSBILLENTRYTEMPLATES - Express Bill Entry Templates
• EX_APPRVR_ASSIGN - EXPENSES APPROVER ASSIGNMENTS
• ALLOCATION_GROUP - Allocation Group
• ACCOUNTINGENTRY - Accounting Entry Template
• PO_CHANGE_TEMPLATE - Procurement Change Template
• COMP_PP_TBL_GBL - Payment Predictor ADS
• TR_BANK_RECON_RULE - Bank Reconciliation Rules

    So, you stop worrying about how to move your setup/configurations from your Development instances to Test/QA instance and to Production.

Another key benefit of using the ADS is you can setup Relations and Groups.

Relations: Between ADS definitions, like your User Profile ADS can link to Roles ADS by linking the PSROLEUSER fields between your PSOPRDEFN and PSROLEDEFN. This too can be restricted with Relation Criteria like only when the Role Name is not in the list or it's custom role.

Groups: Group records and fields involved in the ADS definition to have common actions during migration.

1. Hide Differences -  Define groups of fields that can be used to hide less important data in the compare report display
2. Merge Configurations - During copy, preserve any configuration changes made on the target data set instance if the fields changed are part of this data set group

    Additionally, you can extend the given compare and copy DMW features by creating App. Packages by extending PTADSDEFN:AdsValidationBase Which can be even used for doing the transformation when the source and target data structure is slightly different. E.g., Exported ACCOUNT field value needs to be loaded into ACCT_CODE field of the target instance.

Where you can leverage ADS?

    By going through key benefits and understanding advantages of ADS approach of moving the setup/configuration data, you might have already visioned your business cases. Yet, I would like to give my perspective on where you can actually benefit consultants to make their life easier and effective.

    Where I have worked in the past 1.5 decade with various customers, except very few customers all others were having at least 10-20 bolton's and some of which require quarterly/yearly setup changes and every time and expert consultant spent at least 2-3 days of his effort in preparing data load templates or scripts and even after data loading they have to reconcile the data and provide reports to the business before they use it on live instance. Feel free to provide your comments if you have different experience in this regard.

    I suggest you spent some time in preparing the ADS Definitions and Projects for bolton's and validate the data export/import for different business cases, so that these can save almost 3-4 weeks of effort in an year, which is almost 10% of your yearly effort. And the same can be used in your sub-sequent upgrade as well, since these can be added in Change Assistant to execute during the upgrade, so it becomes available immediately after you create your demo instance.

Sample - Use Case

    To make things more clear I would like to give a real-time example of having the ADS Definition for custom component and moving data between PeopleSoft Applications.

Here is my simple component which has 3 levels of data,

Base navigation for ADS components will be PeopleTools > Lifecycle Tools > Migrate Data  

Fig 1: Sample Component

As this component follows a typical parent-child relations (just like any other component), creating a ADS will be supported and easy.

Fig 2: ADS Definition and Record Details

Using this I have created a simple ADS Project to export employees who's ID's starts with "E", as below,

Fig 3: ADS Project

    In the Data Set Name you can specify the filters and add even related ADS definitions if it is included in the "Relations" tab of the ADS Definition component. Initially the Project State will be in "Created" but eventually by doing the "Copy to File", "Validate" actions it will move to different statues.

Fig 4: Search Content with Criteria

Fig 5: Inserted Content with "Copy" Action

Click "Copy to File" in the main screen to initiate the Application Engine to take care of the rest.

Fig 6: "Copy to File" Process Initiation

Your process message log will show the details and to proceed with next step,

Fig 7: Process Logs of "Copy to File"

On the target instance, the same ADS Definition must exists and the exported files should either be moved to target server by Admin help or accessible from target instance.

Simply click "Load Project from File" in the target and specify the ADS Project Name which got exported in the source instance.

Fig 8: ADS Migration Workbench Landing Page

You can select multiple projects in-case if you have multiple project to import.

Fig 9: Select Project Name's to Load

This time you will have "Validate", "Compare" and "Submit to Copy" buttons enabled as you do the import. First click "Validate" and run the same process to verify the compatibility and file availability.

Then you can do "Compare" to check the data changes, for this time I have manually changed the data (Employee Name) in the target instance and compared it.

Fig 10: Post Validate and before Compare

Compare results will look like this, you can set the properties to hide the LASTUPDDTTM and LASTUPDOPRID kind of fields just like you would do in Application Designer compares.

Fig 11: Compare Report for each of the matched Key

Ensure that you have approved the copy using the same component.

Fig 12: Approval View of ADS Project

Finally the status of the project will become "Copy from file succeeded".

Fig 13: After the ADS Project got copied to target

    Hope you have learned something from this post. Any additional Oracle PeopleSoft provided details can be found in the their documentation PeopleBook Link for ADS.

    If you happen to have questions still please post it as comment here or reach me out from other contacts I had given on my profile.

Happy Learning as always 🙂