Re: PeopleCode.....

[David Thompson-Hall <david.thompson-hall@DOIT.WISC.EDU>]

At 09:18 AM 1/8/02 -0500, Rick Creek wrote:

>The syntax for doing what you want is:
>
>First, the function you want to call must already exist on the other record.
>
>On the field event of the record that needs to execute the other record's
>PeopleCode, this is what you do:
>(1) you declare the function
>(2) you call the function with any optional parameters.

This is a good description of a solution to the problem.

But what you can't do is just call any old event-related PeopleCode for any
field object anywhere.

So at no point can you say anything like

      personal_data.emplid.rowinit

which would sure be handy for populating Emplids, etc.


Of course, from one perspective, clearly PS PeopleCode events are not
strictly procedures or functions; they can't take parameters or return
values. So it kind of makes sense...

But for those of us who have worked on event-based languages like Visual
Basic, this seems really odd.  We expect to be able to call any Event code
from anywhere, and treat it like a procedure.  However, this is not allowed
within PeopleCode.  The only solution is to bundle the PeopleCode you want
into a fieldFormula and call it that way.

This means you can't just call PeopleSoft code for certain business
processes, because they are tied to particular events for particular
records, and not stored as funclib functions.

My hope is that version 8 will give us some more flexibility in some of
this, but I don't know enough about the whole set PeopleCode/AppEngine
changes that relate to this.

If someone out there has done PeopleCode 8, I'd really like to know how
this might work...

DTH
(after all, why wait six weeks for training when you can get it 'online'...?)


David Thompson-Hall                                     1210 W. Dayton St.
Programmer/Analyst                                      Madison, WI 53706
Apps Tech/Operational Support Apps                      608/265-9571
Div of Info Technology (DoIT)
University of Wisconsin-Madison david.thompson-hall@doit.wisc.edu