Search Results upgrade_garnishment

Overview

PAY_US_GARN_UPGRADE is an Oracle E-Business Suite PL/SQL package owned by the APPS schema that supports the migration of United States garnishment elements from an older architectural model to the current architecture used by Oracle Payroll. It is a legislative or country-specific upgrade utility rather than a runtime payroll processing package. As stated in its header documentation, the package is invoked by a concurrent program, and its stated purpose is to "upgrade all old architectural Garnishment Elements to New architecture."

The package was introduced to address the structural differences between legacy garnishment element definitions and the redesigned element architecture that Oracle Payroll adopted. Under the older model, garnishment elements were defined in a way that did not take full advantage of the balance feed, formula result rule, and processing rule framework that later releases rely upon. The upgrade package rebuilds those definitions so that garnishment deductions behave consistently with other element types and participate correctly in payroll calculations, balance accumulation, and reporting.

The package declares AUTHID CURRENT_USER, meaning it executes with the privileges of the invoking user rather than the definer. This is consistent with many Oracle Payroll upgrade utilities that must respect the calling session's security context. The header notes that the package was created to resolve a specific defect (Bug 3549298) and was authored in September 2004, with the source revision dating to January 2007.

A critical operational note is embedded in the package header: customers must recompile all uncompiled formulas after running the upgrade process. Because the upgrade rewrites formula-related configuration, stale or invalid compiled formula state can lead to incorrect payroll results if the recompilation step is omitted.

Key Procedures and Functions

The package exposes two documented procedures.

• UPGRADE_GARNISHMENT — The primary driver of the upgrade. It accepts an element type identifier and performs the conversion of the corresponding legacy garnishment element into the new architecture. This procedure is the entry point called for each garnishment element that requires migration, and it coordinates the rewrite of the element's associated formulas, input values, balance feeds, result rules, and processing rules.
• QUAL_ELEM_UPG — A qualification routine that determines whether a given object qualifies for the upgrade. It returns a qualification result through an output parameter, allowing the calling process to identify which elements are eligible for conversion before the upgrade is attempted. This prevents the upgrade logic from being applied to elements that are already in the target architecture or that fall outside its scope.

No additional public procedures or functions are documented beyond these two.

Tables Accessed

The package reads from and writes to core Oracle Payroll and Fast Formula dictionary tables. The documented tables referenced through APPS synonyms include:

• PAY_ELEMENT_TYPES_F and PAY_ELEMENT_CLASSIFICATIONS — the primary element definition records that the upgrade rewrites to the new architecture.
• PAY_INPUT_VALUES_F — input value definitions attached to each element, which must be reconciled against the new model.
• FF_FORMULAS_F and PAY_FORMULA_RESULT_RULES_F — the formula definitions and the rules that determine where calculated results are written; these are central to the recompilation requirement noted in the header.
• PAY_BALANCE_TYPES and PAY_BALANCE_FEEDS_F — balance definitions and the feeds that route element results into balances.
• PAY_STATUS_PROCESSING_RULES_F — processing rules that govern how the element behaves at payroll run time.
• PLITBLM — a PL/SQL index-by table used internally for bulk processing.

Usage Notes

PAY_US_GARN_UPGRADE is not intended for direct invocation by end users or by custom application code. It is driven by a concurrent program, which is submitted during an upgrade or patch cycle by a system administrator with the appropriate Payroll responsibility. The package is referenced by zero other packages, confirming its role as a standalone utility rather than a reusable API.

The procedure should be run in a controlled maintenance window. Following execution, all uncompiled formulas associated with the upgraded garnishment elements must be recompiled before payroll processing resumes; failing to do so leaves formula state inconsistent and can produce incorrect results. Because the package modifies core element and formula dictionary data, a full backup of the affected entities and a validated test run in a non-production environment are recommended before applying it to a live payroll installation.