The Evolution of PeopleBooks

Firstly, what are PeopleBooks?  PeopleBooks are a full fledged reference guide that empower PeopleSoft Application Users and PeopleSoft Consultants in their time of need. These books do not typically provide easy to follow step-by-step help, instead they typically provide you with the key information to use PeopleSoft Applications and Systems most effectively and implement according to your organizational or departmental needs. PeopleSoft always recommend that you take their training classes and PeopleBooks are geared to offer up information that expands on the material covered in PeopleSoft training classes.

PeopleBooks has evolved over time, in the beginning the PeopleBooks were as big as the application themselves to download.  Many a tree has been sacraficed in the pursuit of PeopleSoft knowledge.  PeopleBooks are still available to download from Oracle’s edelivery website for each of the applications and PeopleTools, however, installing and configuring PeopleBooks locally tends to be a terribly time consuming and frustrating experiment.

Good News!  PeopleBooks does NOT need to be installed and configured locally.  A few years back Oracle made all the PeopleBooks available in a centeralized location that are up to date and can be linked to your HelpURL’s within the PeopleSoft Applications.

PeopleBooks Online Reference Page:

http://www.oracle.com/pls/psft/homepage

PeopleBooks Linked To PeopleSoft Application:

The absolutely best part of these hosted PeopleBooks is that you can set the Help Link within the PIA by setting the HELP URL in the web profile. (Home > PeopleTools > Web Profile > Web Profile Configuration – General Tab)

Change the value for the PeopleBooks Help URL field by using the following URL format, substituting the value of UlinkID1 and UlinkID2 with values from the Universal Linking Product Line Codes table below. You may add as many iterations of &ctx=UlinkID to the URL as desired. You can also SQL insert/update this into the PSWEBPROFNVP table using the attribute “HELPURL”. A good recommendation is to have this in your refresh scripts.

The following is a list of the UlinkID and the Product it is associated with, however, these are constantly changing.  A quick way of determining the latest UlinkID for your application is to go to the PeopleBooks Online Page and find the PeopleBook you are wanting to reference and hover over it and see the Product Code in the URL:

When installing Tuxedo for the first time on Windows 2008 R2 (this allow apparently happens on 2008 and 2003), I have encountered an error saying:

Error The value of -TUXDIR- is not set.
Registry key -\10.3.0.0_VS2005\Environment\TUXDIR- is empty you must cancel the installation.
If you do not, the installer will run but Tuxedo 10gR3
with VS2005 will not be installed.

To get around this problem you need to remove the Tuxedo Registry entry using regedit:

Since, Tuxedo had never been installed, I deleted the entire “TUXEDO” level of entries.

The last 5 or so times I have gone to install a rolling patch on windows I have run into the errors.

The first problem that comes up do I install a 32 bit or 64 bit Rolling Patch Set.  The answer is, PeopleSoft as of 8.52.xx toolset still uses a 32-bit tuxedo version for Windows.  All other platforms are 64 bit.  So make sure when you download the Rolling Patch that you select 32-bit Windows.

The next problem is that the LaunchAnywhere installer will report that it can’t find the java virtual machine.  Make sure that there is a “java_home”\jdk\bin in your path.  With a Oracle platform there is often a 32 bit jdk home in the product\client folder.  Another option is to set the LAX_VM variable.  For example I just installed RP102 on a new machine and used the following command:

RP102.exe LAX_VM “c:\oracle\product\11.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe”

That should solve the problem!

When cloning databases in SQL Server from one server to another, you can run into the problem where the userid that is associated with the database is not valid in the security of the database engine that is hosting the new database.

An easy fix to this problem is to run the following statement:

EXEC sp_change_users_login ‘Auto_Fix’, ‘user‘

You can list all the users that are orphaned by running the following statement:

EXEC sp_change_users_login ‘Report’

When in a production environment there are times when it is not beneficial to have the previous login userid showing on the login page.  This is especially true when in kiosk mode where you really don’t want people to know other accounts within the system.

In order to change this setting you need to go into the web profile configuration for the PIA site in question.  The web profile being used will be in the configuration.properties file of the PIA site you are working on.  Typically the web profile will be DEV or TEST or KIOSK or PROD.

Navigate to:  Home > PeopleTools > Web Profile > Web Profile Configuration, select you web profile you want to change:

Under the Security Tab: change parameter – “days to auto fill userid” to 0 (zero).

Save the change and reboot your application server and web server, probably not a bad idea to clear cache here as well.