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Overview

The CTXSYS.AD_CTX_DDL package is an Oracle Text (interMedia Text) administration utility that ships with the CTXSYS schema and is exposed to the Oracle E-Business Suite through public synonyms created in the APPLSYS, APPS, and various product schemas. In the EBS 12.1.1 and 12.2.2 environments, this package serves as a wrapper over the Oracle Text DDL layer, providing the procedural interface by which text indexes, preferences, section groups, and stoplists are created, modified, and maintained. The package is classified in ETRM as an "OTHER" API, indicating that it is not part of the standard EBS business API set but rather a supporting technical utility consumed by multiple EBS product families. Its status is VALID in the documented environment, and it depends only on SYS and STANDARD, confirming it is a lightweight DDL dispatcher rather than a business-logic package.

Key Procedures and Functions

The ETRM metadata documents 30 procedures and functions. The principal groups are:

• Preference management: CREATE_PREFERENCE and DROP_PREFERENCE manage Oracle Text preferences such as lexers, wordlist preferences, storage, and filter preferences used when building a text index.
• Section group management: CREATE_SECTION_GROUP, DROP_SECTION_GROUP, and the ADD_*_SECTION procedures — ADD_ATTR_SECTION, ADD_FIELD_SECTION, ADD_SPECIAL_SECTION, ADD_STOP_SECTION, and ADD_ZONE_SECTION — define how structured and unstructured content is partitioned for searching.
• Stoplists: CREATE_STOPLIST, DROP_STOPLIST, ADD_STOPWORD, ADD_STOPCLASS, and ADD_STOPTHEME govern the exclusion of low-value tokens during indexing.
• Index operations: CREATE_INDEX_SET, DROP_INDEX_SET, ADD_INDEX, REMOVE_INDEX, and OPTIMIZE_INDEX handle the lifecycle of text index sets and the maintenance of existing indexes.
• Lexer extension: ADD_SUB_LEXER allows a custom lexer to be registered beneath a parent lexer.

These routines are documented at the name level only; parameter lists are not published in the ETRM extract and should not be assumed.

Tables Accessed

The ETRM record lists no application tables referenced through APPS synonyms, and no referenced-by packages. This is consistent with the package's role as a DDL executor: its effects are written to Oracle Text dictionary objects such as CTX_INDEXES, CTX_PREFERENCES, CTX_SECTION_GROUPS, CTX_STOPLISTS, and CTX_USER_* views owned by CTXSYS, not to EBS business tables such as FND_* or application data tables. Because it is referenced by AMV, APPLSYS, APPS, AR, CS, EGO, ICX, JTF, OKC, and PA (as documented), the package is invoked across a wide spread of modules — notably CRM, iStore, Contracts (OKC), Projects (PA), and Advanced Pricing (AMV).

Usage Notes

In Oracle EBS, AD_CTX_DDL is typically invoked from installation and patching scripts, from concurrent programs that rebuild text indexes, and from custom PL/SQL where an application needs to define or refresh an Oracle Text index. Administrators commonly call OPTIMIZE_INDEX after large data loads to reclaim index fragmentation, and CREATE_PREFERENCE / CREATE_SECTION_GROUP during setup of a new searchable region. Because the package is owned by CTXSYS and synonymed into APPLSYS, APPS, and product schemas, it should be called through the APPS or product synonym rather than fully qualified. Direct invocation from Forms is unusual; most EBS callers are backend scripts or concurrent managers. Any modifications to preferences or section groups should be preceded by a backup of the affected Oracle Text objects, as DROP_PREFERENCE and DROP_SECTION_GROUP are irreversible without re-creation.