“About This Page” – Part 1

You may have noticed the “About this Page” link in the lower left of your R12 pages. If you haven’t, I’ll tell you how to make it appear.

If you’re anything like me, you hardly have time to stop what you’re doing to find a new clever way to do things; however, spending some time with “About this Page” has paid off for me and is quickly becoming a well worn tool on my E-Business Suite toolbelt. For E-Business Suite Business Analysts, Developers and Solution Architects we are constantly working to find things in the database quickly based on data in a form or HTML page. Many people have years of knowledge regarding tablenames and the data structures; however, if you find yourself in a module you may not be intimately familiar, finding that data can slow you down.

Typically, when I am researching a transactional problem, designing new extensions or writing reports and the application is Forms based, I use the forms diagnostics drop down menu. (Help – Diagnostics).

Forms: Help – Diagnostics

This menu has helped me countless times to get the column, table or data I am looking for.

But, with HTML pages you’re out of luck with the diagnostics menu!

Enabling About This Page

To Enable “About this Page” set the Profile Option “FND: Diagnostics” at the user level.

Enabling “About this Page” for a single user.

Security Note: You will expose details about your system to unauthenticated users if you set this profile option to “Yes” at the site or application level and is not recommended.

What’s Available in “About This Page”

Once you have “About this Page” at the bottom of your pages, you immediately have access to some of the information we’re used to finding in the Help –> Diagnostics menu in the Java forms.

About this Page

From Here, you can expand the Page Definition tree, I typically do “Expand All” and this gives you access to the View Objects that drive the page data.

Page: Shows page controller and module objects

Personalization: Lists any personalizations against the page

Page Context: Lists the instance and user details

Technology Components: Platform details for the page you are on

Java System Properties: Server side java properties

Profiles: Lists profile options driving the page

Patches: List or query for patches on the system

Most often I use the Page tab and navigate to the Page Definition and “Expand All” to see the view objects (which contain the queries) driving the content on the page.