Overview of Flexfields

Flexfields

A flexfield is a flexible data field that your organization can customize to your business needs without programming. Oracle Applications uses two types of flexfields, key flexfields and descriptive flexfields. A key flexfield is a field you can customize to enter multi-segment values such as part numbers, account numbers, and so on. A descriptive flexfield is a field you customize to enter additional information for which your Oracle Applications product has not already provided a field.

Basic Business Needs

Oracle Applications flexfields let you satisfy the following business needs:

Have "intelligent fields"--fields comprised of one or more segments, where each segment has both a value and a meaning.

Rely upon your application to validate the values or the combination of values that you enter in intelligent fields.

Have the structure of an intelligent field change depending on data in your application.

Capture additional information if you so choose.

Customize data fields to your meet your business needs without programming.

Query intelligent fields for very specific information.

Definitions

Key Flexfields

A key flexfield is a field made up of segments, where each segment has both a value and a meaning. You can think of a key flexfield as an "intelligent" field that your business can use to store information represented as "codes."

A key flexfield is flexible enough to let you use any code scheme you want to describe an entity. When your organization initially installs an Oracle Applications product, your organization's implementation team customizes all the key flexfields in that product to use meaningful code segments to describe each key flexfield entity. Your organization decides for each key flexfield, how many segments an entity has, what each segment means, what values each segment can have, and what each segment value means. Your organization can also define rules that govern what combination of segment values are valid (cross-validation rules), or define dependencies among the segments. The result is that your organization can use the codes it needs rather than change its codes to meet someone else's requirements.

The Accounting Flexfield in your Oracle Assets application is an example of a key flexfield that identifies a unique chart of accounts. One organization may choose to customize the Accounting Flexfield to have three segments called Company, Department, and Account, while another organization may choose to customize the flexfield to have six segments called Company, Cost Center, Account, Product, Product Line, and Subaccount, as shown in Figure in the Account column.

Descriptive Flexfields

A descriptive flexfield gives you room to expand your forms, since Oracle Applications cannot predict all the possible information you may want to track. Your organization can use descriptive flexfields to capture additional information that is important and unique to your business.

Your organization's implementation team can customize a descriptive flexfield to include as many additional fields as your organization needs. These fields, also called segments, appear in the descriptive flexfield window.

Each segment in a descriptive flexfield window has a name, and can have a set of valid values. Your organization can define dependencies among the segments or customize a descriptive flexfield to display context-sensitive segments, so that different segments appear depending on the values you enter in other fields or segments.