Per_person_type_usages_f puzzle

Question

Hi,
I'm here to understand per_person_type_usages_f in terms of absence participation...
We have many cases where in this table for a given employee you may see:
1. A Regular Employee row spanning the life of the person record (expected)
2. One or many Participant rows relating to sick absence created by the absence participation process at the time of processing a current absence BUT not including that absence.
So, in one case:
- Regular Employee entry effective from 10/02/1986 to 31/12/4712
- 6 rows relating to sick absence periods between 07/08/2003 and 23/10/2006
- 2 periods of sick absence in 2008 and 2009 which do not have a corresponding row in per_person_type_usages_f (however, the 2008 absence's creation date ties up with the creation date of the retrospective rows in the per_person_type_usages_f table)
This appears to be common across many employees, I just don't understand what it represents. The reason I ask is that we check for a change in person type during interfaced changes in assignment data, so retrospective changes often flag up these changes if a period of absence falls within the effective start date and effective end date of the change to be applied. I need to change that logic to ignore Participant rows probably - but I'd like to understand the way absence appears in this table before I do so.
Many thanks in anticipation for any pointers you may have.
Bagpuss

Answer 1

Well, this is one of those situations where we really need to see your data, which, unfortunately, we cannot do on this forum. Look at your per_person_types table, and the person_type_id values showing for your example employee in the per_person_type_usages_f table. I am thinking that maybe HR or Payroll is changing the person type to something like "Sick Employee" when the employee has an absence, then change back to a regular employee type when the absence ends. Then maybe someone got tired of making all these person type changes and stopped doing that? Just guessing. Generally per_person_types are used to indicate the type of person the person is within the Oracle HR system - such as employee, retiree, applicant, spouse, domestic partner, and so forth. I don't think it was designed/intended for tracking absences, but it certainly could be attempted to be used that way if a company wants to do so. So study your records by joining per_person_types to per_person_type_usages_f and seeing what kinds of person types are being assigned to these absence records. Then you may need to go talk to someone in HR/Payroll to see if they can explain what you are seeing. Hope this makes some sense.
John Dickey