AD Splicer

Oracle Applications provides quite a few utilities which are aimed at effective maintenance and monitoring an Oracle Applications instance. In my next posts i will talk about these UNIX utilities which are also referred to as AD utilities.

Today i used AD Splicer so i will start with this one.

AD Splicer is a utility used to add an off-cycle product into Oracle Applications.

Products which have been released between the base releases of 11i are referred to an off-cycle product. Once AD Splicer is used to splice these off-cycle products into Oracle Applications they are recognized by other AD utilities like AD Patch as a valid Oracle Applications product for a given release.

In a multi node environment adsplicer should be used on all the APPL_TOPs.It is recommended to run AD Splice on the Admin node first.

Before using AD Splice you are required to add the new tablespace for the new products that are going to be added. In case you have migrated to the Oracle Applications new tablespace model you would require to create a new tablespace APPS_TS_TOOLs manually before using AD Splicer.

Ad Splicer makes use of the following control files to add the new off-cycle product into oracle applications.

[prod]prod.txt : This is a product definition file which contains the language independent information about the product.

[prod]terr.txt : This is also a product definition file containing language-specific information about the new product.

Both these product definition files should not be edited manually.

For example the product definition files for the off-cycle product Web ADI are bneterr.txt and bneprod.txt

newprods.txt : This file is also know as the product configuration file. You can edit this file optionally. This file acts as a template for configuring the new product that would be added. It comprises of a list of parameters which include

product- The product being added eg.bne .This must not be changed.

base_product_top - This is the base path where the files for the new product will be places using the Oracle applications filesystem architecture. the default value for this is APPL_TOP.

oracle_schema - This parameter refer to the oracle schema which is the owner of the new product to be added.

sizing_factor - The sizing factor which is to be followed for table and index creation.

main_tspace - The tablespace for product tables

index_tspace - The tablespace for product indexes

temp_tspace - The tablespace for Oracle schema’s temporary segments

default_tspace - This refers to the default table space for the of the Oracle Schema owning the product.

All the above mentioned control files namely the prod.txt,terr.txt and newprods.txt must be placed in $APPL_TOP/admin so that adsplce is able to read them.

Like other Ad utilities AD Splice will also require to make a connection to your database instance using SYSTEM and APPLSYS accounts as a result your database and listener must be running while using AD Splice.

An important fact to note is that products that are added through AD Splice are visible to other AD Utilites except autoupgrade.

The metalink Note 76708.1 contains further details and instructions on using AD Splice.