Search Results child_exists_error

Overview

APPS.BEN_UTILITY is a shared utility package within the Oracle E-Business Suite Benefits (BEN) schema. Its role is to centralize low-level helper routines that other Benefits packages, concurrent programs, and forms invoke repeatedly, rather than duplicating that logic at each call site. The package header carries the source control identifier beutilit.pkh, revision 120.1, last modified in June 2005, indicating that the interface has remained stable across the 12.1.1 and 12.2.2 releases. The ETRM classification for the package is OTHER, reflecting its nature as an internal support library rather than a business-facing API.

The package addresses two broad concerns. The first is consistent error reporting for referential integrity violations encountered during Benefits data processing. The second is the resolution of a participant's or plan's preferred currency. Because the package is referenced by 206 other packages, it functions as a foundational dependency across much of the Benefits module, and changes to its behavior carry wide-ranging consequences.

Key Procedures and Functions

The documented interface exposes three callable units.

• CHILD_EXISTS_ERROR — This is the routine associated with the search term child_exists_error. It is a procedure that raises or reports the condition in which a delete or update operation cannot proceed because dependent child rows still exist for the given parent. The parameter set accommodates the name of the table being acted upon, an optional parent table name, and an optional parent entity name, allowing the message to describe both sides of the relationship. This makes it suitable for generic integrity checks where the specific parent context varies.
• PARENT_INTEGRITY_ERROR — A companion procedure that reports the inverse condition, where a required parent row is missing or the parent relationship cannot be satisfied for the table named in its single parameter. Together with CHILD_EXISTS_ERROR, it supplies the standard error vocabulary the Benefits schema uses when foreign-key style relationships are violated.
• GET_PREFERRED_CURRENCY — A function returning a currency code as a VARCHAR2. It takes an item type and an item key, allowing callers to resolve the preferred currency for a given business object without hard-coding the lookup. This supports Benefits calculations and displays that must honor a participant's or plan's currency preference.

Tables Accessed

The ETRM metadata records two referenced tables via APPS synonyms. ALL_TABLES is consulted by the error-reporting procedures, which accept table names typed against ALL_TABLES.TABLE_NAME and use the data dictionary to validate or describe the table involved in an integrity failure. FND_USER is referenced in support of the package's context resolution, consistent with routines that need to identify the current application user or owner context. No direct DML against Benefits business tables is documented for this package; its access pattern is metadata and context oriented.

Usage Notes

BEN_UTILITY is not intended for direct end-user invocation. It is called programmatically from other PL/SQL packages, from Oracle Forms-based Benefits setup and enrollment screens when validation fails, and from concurrent programs that process participant, plan, and eligibility data. Custom extensions to Benefits should call CHILD_EXISTS_ERROR and PARENT_INTEGRITY_ERROR to produce error messages consistent with standard Oracle behavior, and GET_PREFERRED_CURRENCY when currency context must be derived. Because 206 packages depend on this interface, developers should treat it as a stable contract: the documented signatures should be relied upon, and any modification should be confined to new, additive routines.