An essential guide to one of the most fundamental concepts in Oracle E-Business Suite.
In Oracle E-Business Suite, a "lookup" is a static list of values. It's a simple and powerful tool used to create predefined choices for a field, ensuring data consistency and making the application easier to configure. Think of it as a dropdown list that can be managed without any coding.
The main purpose of a lookup is to keep programs flexible. One of the simplest examples is a 'Gender' lookup. On the screen, a user might see 'Male', 'Female', or 'Unknown'. However, in the database, these are stored as short codes: 'M', 'F', and 'U'.
| GENDER |
|---|
| M |
| F |
| U |
| Gender |
|---|
| Male |
| Female |
| Unknown |
Now, imagine your organization decides to change the display text from "Unknown" to "Undisclosed". Instead of updating thousands of employee records in the database, you only need to make a single change in the lookup definition. The database codes remain the same, but the text displayed to all users updates instantly. This is the power of lookups.
Oracle provides three different types of lookups, each with a different level of restriction to protect core application data while still providing flexibility.
Fully flexible. Ideal for custom lists specific to your business.
Partially restricted. Extend Oracle's base lists with your own codes.
Highly restricted. Used in core application logic.
While you cannot directly attach a lookup to a flexfield segment for validation, you can do it indirectly. The standard method is to create a Table-validated Value Set that queries the FND_LOOKUP_VALUES table for your specific lookup type. This allows your flexfield to display the lookup meanings as a list of values while storing the lookup code.
Lookups are incredibly useful for making code more flexible. Imagine you need to create a database view to send employee data to another system, but you only want to extract active 'Employees' and 'Applicants'. Instead of hard-coding these values in your view's WHERE clause:
WHERE person_type IN ('Employee', 'Applicant') -- This is bad practice!You can use a lookup:
XX_EXTRACT_EMPLOYEE_TYPES.Now, if you need to add 'Contractor' to the extract, you simply add a new code to the lookup without changing any code. This makes maintenance much easier.
CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW xx_extract_employees_v AS
SELECT papf.employee_number,
papf.full_name
FROM per_all_people_f papf,
per_person_types ppt,
fnd_lookup_values flv
WHERE papf.person_type_id = ppt.person_type_id
AND ppt.system_person_type = flv.lookup_code
AND flv.lookup_type = 'XX_EXTRACT_EMPLOYEE_TYPES'
AND TRUNC(SYSDATE) BETWEEN papf.effective_start_date AND papf.effective_end_date;