How can we find formula function in Payroll Formula

Question

Guys,
As far as concern regarding oracle functionality is very vast in particularly in payroll process, mostly functions are built-in to avoid user to create any custom code, but it is not fully covered business requirement. Therefore we need to create our custom function to cover/validate our business need and for this purpose we register this function in formula function, that is the easiest way to add any condition in payroll formula by calling this. Now my requirement is that to find formula name where this function has been used.
Let's suppose any of user is created “X” formula through this functionality and called in payroll formula’s how can we find formula name wherever this function has been called.
Please suggestion

Answer 1

That's a good question. Fast Formula text is stored as a LONG data type which is now a deprecated data type. You can write a PL/SQL utility function to convert the text to a VARCHAR2 and search that but that has two problems:
1) It assumes you have permission to create a function, which isn't something you'll likely have on a production database
2) It'll barf for any formula in excess of 32760 bytes
You can also use the to_lob function to copy the contents of ff_formulas_f into a new table (with a CLOB data type) and then create an Oracle text index to quickly search the CLOB. But again that assumes you have write access.
If you're patient then you can also run this hideous piece of SQL:
SELECT ff.formula_name
,ft.formula_type_name
,src.text source_plsql
FROM ff_formulas_f ff
,ff_formula_types ft
,ff_functions fff
,all_source src
WHERE ff.business_group_id IS NOT NULL
AND ff.formula_type_id = ft.formula_type_id
AND src.name = 'FFP' || to_char(ff.formula_id) || '_' || to_char(ff.effective_start_date, 'DDMMYYYY')
AND src.type = 'PACKAGE BODY'
AND lower(text) like '%' || lower(fff.definition) || '%'
AND trunc(sysdate) BETWEEN
ff.effective_start_date AND ff.effective_end_date
AND upper(nvl(fff.alias_name, fff.name)) = upper('XXC_MY_FFFUNC');
(replacing 'XXC_MY_FFFUNC' with the name of the Fast Formula Function you wish to search). Don't expect it to be fast. What this does is search the generated PLSQL rather than the source formula text. This only looks for customer-defined Fast Formula (those with business_group_id set).