Search Results pay_element_links




Overview
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Overview

PAY_ELEMENT_LINKS is an APPS-owned date-effective view within the Oracle Payroll (PAY) product family, available in EBS 12.1.1 and 12.2.2. Its role is to expose the currently effective rows of the element link definition, which is the configuration entity that determines which employees receive a given payroll element and under what conditions. In Oracle Payroll, an element (for example, a salary, allowance, or deduction) is only processed for a person if an element link exists that qualifies that person through the linking criteria. The view therefore represents the operative ruleset that drives eligibility for payroll processing.

The critical characteristic of this view is its date-effectiveness filter. Rather than returning all rows from the underlying table, it restricts results to records where EFFECTIVE_START_DATE is less than or equal to the session effective date and EFFECTIVE_END_DATE is greater than or equal to that same date. The session effective date is obtained from FND_SESSIONS using USERENV('SESSIONID'), which means the view returns datable rows as of the current Oracle Applications session rather than as of the system date. This makes it suitable for both online forms and concurrent programs that set a specific effective date.

Underlying Base Objects

The view is defined over two documented objects, both referenced through APPS synonyms:

  • PAY_ELEMENT_LINKS_F — the base (date-tracked) table holding all element link records, including historical and future-dated versions. The view selects all of its columns and applies the effective-date predicate against this table.
  • FND_SESSIONS — the applications session table, used in two correlated subqueries to fetch the session effective date (aliased SS for the start-date check and SE for the end-date check).

The view is a simple projection with a WHERE clause; there is no aggregation, join to descriptive tables, or derivation of new columns. Because the view performs no translation of the underlying foreign keys, consumers must join to the relevant lookup and entity tables (for example, PAY_ELEMENT_TYPES_F, PER_ALL_PEOPLE_GROUPS, HR_ALL_ORGANIZATION_UNITS) to obtain meaningful descriptions. No database triggers or instead-of triggers apply, so the view is read-only in practice and should not be used for DML.

Key Columns

The view exposes the full PAY_ELEMENT_LINKS_F column set. The most significant columns are:

Common Use Cases and Queries

Typical uses include auditing element eligibility, reconciling which links exist per business group, and extracting link data for integration or reporting. A basic query listing effective links for a business group:

  • SELECT el.ELEMENT_LINK_ID, el.ELEMENT_TYPE_ID, el.PAYROLL_ID, el.EFFECTIVE_START_DATE, el.EFFECTIVE_END_DATE FROM apps.pay_element_links el WHERE el.BUSINESS_GROUP_ID = :p_business_group_id ORDER BY el.ELEMENT_TYPE_ID;
  • Join to the element type to obtain names, filtering by a payroll or by the all-payrolls flag:
  • SELECT el.ELEMENT_LINK_ID, et.ELEMENT_NAME, el.PAYROLL_ID FROM apps.pay_element_links el, apps.pay_element_types_f et WHERE el.ELEMENT_TYPE_ID = et.ELEMENT_TYPE_ID AND el.LINK_TO_ALL_PAYROLLS_FLAG = 'Y';
  • Determine which links target a specific organization or people group for eligibility analysis:
  • SELECT ELEMENT_LINK_ID, ORGANIZATION_ID, PEOPLE_GROUP_ID FROM apps.pay_element_links WHERE ORGANIZATION_ID = :p_org_id;

Because the view is date-effective against the session date, queries run from a form or concurrent program with a set effective date automatically return the correct historical or future version of each link. When a specific "as of" date is required independently of the session, query the base table PAY_ELEMENT_LINKS_F with an explicit date predicate instead, or set the session effective date before querying the view.