Vacation Rule

We all know that through oracle employee self-service employee can setup vacation rule before leaving office and can use this functionality to send automated note or delegate the response.  Once the vacation rule is setup all the notifications will be routed to new assignee. Though employee can even setup vacation rule much in advance, there comes a scenario when it is not practically possible for employee to setup vacation rule. There could be various reasons like few listed below but not limited to:

• Employee falls sick and can not access production instance from home to setup vacation rule.
• There is a technical issue with application when employee is trying to setup vacation rule and cannot wait till the issue is fixed.
• Production instance is down for maintenance and employee cannot access employee self-service
• Employees account is expired and have submitted for renewal or forgot the password.

What if employee didn’t setup Vacation  Rule

[su_frame][/su_frame]Now we know the reasons and possible scenarios when an employee can leave the office without setting up vacation rule. So, how would we cope up with situation? Vacation Rule can be setup for any employee through Sysadmin account also  using the responsibility “Workflow Administrator Web Applications” but again this is not practically possible to request “Sysadmin” every time to setup vacation rule. This is also not possible when you have to go through different approval to engage your Sysadmin. You cannot even give access of responsibility “Workflow Administrator Web Applications” to anybody as it is much powerful than just setting up Vacation Rule. So to effectively handle this scenario we can create a custom responsibility that will only have access to setup vacation rule and search any notifications. In the next steps you will come to know how this can be done steps by steps.

Create custom responsibility to setup vacation rule

Step1: Create a custom Menu

Create a custom menu with following functions (with prompt) attached.

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Step2: Create a Cutom Responsibility

Now create a custom responsibility and attach the custom menu you created in previous step.

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Step3: Login as Sysadmin and select responsibility “Workflow Administrator Web Applications”

After that follow the navigation Administrator Workflow » Administration » Select the responsibility created in previous steps » Click on Apply

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As an alternative you also also use below script

update wf_resources
set text = (select name from wf_roles where display_name = ‘YOU CUSTOM MENU NAME’)
where name = ‘WF_ADMIN_ROLE’;
commit;

Step4. Assign your custom responsibility to user

Now you can attach the responsibility you created to any user you want to give access to setup vacation rule and track notifications.

After following these steps assigned user will now have access to setup vacation rule for any employee or update the vacation rule already setup by any employee. Since we have assigned the function “Workflow Notification Search” user can also track any notification.

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Step5: Option : If you want, you can also attach function “Workflow Status Monitor” with your custom menu

This is to give “Status Monitor” access. User would be able to Rewind, Reassign, Suspend or cancel any workflow.

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Other references for Vacation Rule

If you have access to oracle my support (Metalink) you may also be interested to check following document Ids

• Doc ID 803490.1 : How To Avoid Error Message “Only the Workflow Administrators can Modify the Vacation Rules of other Users” By Setting Up Another User, Not SYSADMIN, To Maintain Workflow Vacation Rules (Doc ID 803490.1)
• Doc ID 1582957.1 : Approver Name On The Approval Sequence Is Incorrect When Notification Is Delegated to a Responsibility Via Vacation Rule (Doc ID 1582957.1)
• Doc ID 804982.1 : Cannot Set Vacation Rules – Only The Workflow Administrators Can Modify The Vacation Rules Of Other Users (Doc ID 804982.1)
• Doc ID 750769.1 : How to Restrict the Available Workflow Administration Screens to just Notification Search and Vacation Rules ? (Doc ID 750769.1)

Interview Question

Here comes an interview question related to this topic. When you setup vacation rule for any employee you see two options first “Delegate your response” and second “Transfer notification ownership”. Could you please tell us what is the difference between these two and how would you know/track this from back-end.

You can post your answer in the comment section. I hope you would have liked this article.