Search Results synchronous_flag

Overview

OTA_CATEGORY_USAGES_V1 is a read-only view owned by the APPS schema in Oracle E-Business Suite, registered as a VALID object within the OTA – Learning Management product family. Its documented purpose is to "list all the uses of a Category." In the ETRM data model, categories are the hierarchical containers used to classify and organize learning content, offerings, and related catalog entities. The view exposes every association between a category and the objects that consume it, including the parent/child relationships between category usages, activation dates, and descriptive text in the user's language.

Because the view joins a base table to its translation table and filters on the session language, it presents end-user-facing category and description values rather than internal identifiers alone. This makes it a natural source for concurrent programs, OAF/Forms LOVs, and outbound integrations that must report which learning objects are attached to a given category. The presence of the SYNCHRONOUS_FLAG column — the term matched in the user's search — indicates that the view also carries the scheduling semantics of each category usage, distinguishing usages that are processed synchronously (immediately, in the same transaction context) from those deferred to asynchronous processing. This distinction matters in Learning Management, where enrollment, completion, and catalog-update logic may be triggered inline or queued for batch handling. The ONLINE_FLAG serves a parallel role for online versus offline availability. Together these columns allow callers to filter category usages by processing mode without touching the base tables directly, which is the principal integration benefit of the view.

Underlying Base Objects

The view is defined over two documented base objects, both referenced through APPS synonyms: OTA_CATEGORY_USAGES and OTA_CATEGORY_USAGES_TL. The _TL table is the translation (language) table, joined on CATEGORY_USAGE_ID, and the view restricts it with CUT.LANGUAGE = USERENV('LANG'), ensuring each row returns the category name and description in the current session language. The driving table OTA_CATEGORY_USAGES supplies the operational columns, including the primary key CATEGORY_USAGE_ID, the self-referencing PARENT_CAT_USAGE_ID, the business group, the usage TYPE, date-effective fields, and the descriptive flexfield columns ATTRIBUTE_CATEGORY through ATTRIBUTE20. The view text also selects TCU.ROWID and OBJECT_VERSION_NUMBER, which supports optimistic locking in the underlying entity. Because the view is a simple two-table join with a language predicate and no aggregation, it remains inherently updatable for the base table's non-translated columns, though Oracle documents it as a query surface and it should be treated as such by custom code.

Key Columns

• CATEGORY_USAGE_ID — Primary key identifying a single usage of a category.
• PARENT_CAT_USAGE_ID — Self-referencing parent, enabling the category usage hierarchy.
• CATEGORY / CATEGORY_MEANING / DESCRIPTION — Translated values surfaced from OTA_CATEGORY_USAGES_TL for the session language.
• TYPE — Classifies the category usage.
• START_DATE_ACTIVE / END_DATE_ACTIVE — Date-effective window for the usage.
• SYNCHRONOUS_FLAG — Indicates whether the category usage is processed synchronously or deferred; the focal column for the user's search.
• ONLINE_FLAG — Indicates online availability of the usage.
• BUSINESS_GROUP_ID — Multi-tenant partitioning key.
• OBJECT_VERSION_NUMBER — Concurrency control for the underlying entity.
• ATTRIBUTE_CATEGORY, ATTRIBUTE1–20 — Descriptive flexfield segments for customer extensions.
• DATA_SOURCE, COMMENTS — Origin and free-text annotation of the usage record.

Common Use Cases and Queries

Typical applications include reporting category hierarchies, validating that a category is actively used before deletion, and extracting usages by processing mode. The following query lists active synchronous usages for the current language and business group:

SELECT category, category_usage_id, parent_cat_usage_id, type,
       synchronous_flag, online_flag, start_date_active
FROM   apps.ota_category_usages_v1
WHERE  business_group_id = :p_bg_id
AND    synchronous_flag = 'Y'
AND    SYSDATE BETWEEN NVL(start_date_active, SYSDATE)
       AND NVL(end_date_active, SYSDATE + 1);

A second common pattern resolves the full ancestry of a usage by walking PARENT_CAT_USAGE_ID with a CONNECT BY clause, joined to this view for translated labels. Integrations frequently select CATEGORY_USAGE_ID, OBJECT_VERSION_NUMBER, and the flexfield ATTRIBUTE columns to synchronize external catalogs, and typically filter on SYNCHRONOUS_FLAG to decide whether the target system may process the update inline or must queue it. Callers should always constrain by BUSINESS_GROUP_ID and observe the translation predicate implicitly enforced by the view.