Search Results range_person_on

Overview

PAY_AC_UTILITY is a shared PL/SQL utility package in the APPS schema that supports Oracle Payroll's absence, balance, and reporting infrastructure. Its name reflects an "absence/accrual" (AC) utility role, and it is primarily consumed as a helper layer by other payroll packages rather than being called directly by end users. The package centralizes common lookup and conversion logic that many payroll programs require, such as resolving a defined balance to its surrogate identifier, translating balance type identifiers into displayable names, and extracting geographic information used on payroll reports and statutory forms.

Because it encapsulates these low-level lookups, PAY_AC_UTILITY reduces duplication across the payroll code base and provides a single point of maintenance for balance and reporting-format metadata. It is marked VALID in the dictionary and is heavily reused: the metadata records that it is referenced by 64 other database objects, indicating its central position in the payroll package dependency graph.

Key Procedures and Functions

The documented interface exposes ten routines:

• GET_DEFINED_BALANCE_ID — Resolves a defined balance (by name or context) to the internal DEFINED_BALANCE_ID used as a foreign key in balance processing.
• GET_BALANCE_NAME — Returns the balance name for a supplied balance or defined balance identifier, supporting multilingual name resolution.
• GET_BAL_REPORTING_NAME — Retrieves the reporting name associated with a balance, used where a shortened or reporting-specific label is required rather than the full balance name.
• GET_BALANCE_TYPE_ID — Returns the BALANCE_TYPE_ID for a given balance type, allowing callers to avoid hard-coded identifiers.
• GET_VALUE — A generic value-retrieval helper used to fetch a configured value from payroll setup or balance metadata.
• RANGE_PERSON_ON — Derives or ranges a person-related value, used in assignment and person filtering logic.
• GET_GEOCODE — Returns a geographic code (for example a county or state code) used in US payroll tax and reporting contexts.
• PRINT_LOB — Emits the contents of a large object (LOB), used when generating report or letter output containing CLOB/BLOB data.

Tables Accessed

The package reads from, and in limited cases writes to, a focused set of payroll reference tables:

• PAY_DEFINED_BALANCES and PAY_BALANCE_TYPES / PAY_BALANCE_TYPES_TL — the core sources for balance identifiers, names, and translated reporting names.
• PAY_BALANCE_DIMENSIONS — supplies dimension context used when resolving balances.
• PAY_REPORT_FORMAT_MAPPINGS_F and PAY_REPORT_FORMAT_PARAMETERS — drive the report-format and parameter lookups used by GET_VALUE and PRINT_LOB.
• PAY_US_COUNTIES and PAY_US_STATES — the reference sources behind GET_GEOCODE.
• HR_ORGANIZATION_INFORMATION and HR_US_FF_UDFS — organization-level and US legislative (flexfield) data used in person and geography resolution.
• DBMS_LOB, UTL_RAW, and PLITBLM — supplied PL/SQL and SQL utilities used for LOB output and raw data handling.

Usage Notes

PAY_AC_UTILITY is not exposed as a standalone concurrent program or form. It is invoked indirectly by the 64 payroll packages that depend on it — balance calculation engines, absence and accrual processing, and payroll report generation. Developers extending Oracle Payroll should call these routines rather than re-implementing balance name or geocode lookup logic, since the package already applies NLS translation and the correct reporting-format mappings. Callers must have EXECUTE granted on the APPS-owned package and should be aware that its routines assume payroll-standard setup data is present in the referenced balance and format tables.