Record History

Question

I'm a complete newcomer to Oracle. Try as I may, it's difficult to cut through the mystique that surrounds Oracle and its (in-house) administrators. I thought I had a simple question. As I understand it, Oracle can present you with certain boxes that contain a "start date" and an "end date" for whichever item you're working on. However, these boxes (if they are not mandatory) can remain blank, if users choose not to fill them in. Therefore, if a report is requested and it is based on these fields, the report is ultimately useless. However, I have discovered the "Record History" element of the system, which (unless I'm mistaken) is independent of the user and is a system generated date, not depending upon the whims of the user.
If a new GL Account is created on the Oracle system, I believe that the sytem will record a Record History for it. Is there an easy way to create a report which specifies all new GL Accounts created between a system "start date" and a system "end date"? I believe the system will provide you with the record history of individual GL creations, but is it possible to capture a (within date range) group of record history dates?
[Posted more in hope than expectation]
Regards,
Geoff

Answer 1

Hi Geoff,
The answer to your question is "Yes" in most cases.
The majority of Oracle eBusiness Suite tables have the following "About this Record" information that users can't change, so look for these columns in the tables you are interested in:
created_by - The user_id from fnd_user of the User that created the record
creation_date - The date/time to the second that the record was created
last_updated_by - The user_id from fnd_user of the User that last updated the record
last_update_date - The date/time to the second that the record was last updated
last_update_login - The session id of the last update
And, yes you can write a report relatively reliably on any table that has these columns and say things like:
select *
from fnd_flex_values ffv
where ffv.creation_date >= to_date('01-JAN-2008','DD-MON-YYYY')
and ffv.creation_date < to_date('01-FEB-2008','DD-MON-YYYY')
The reason I say "relatively reliably" here is that just occasionally, the developers miss setting the values for these columns, e.g. from memory I think ar_receivable_applications_all truncates creation_date.
So test your reports!
Alternatively if you want complete audit history, look at the standard AuditTrail functionality.
Regards,
Gareth