Troubleshooting
Our Most Useful Implementation Report
Every implementation team will have a mini arsenal of reports and dashboards they use to make common tasks a little less routine. Many will be variations on the same theme, however others will vary. I thought I’d share the one I use the most.
Problem Statement
Security Console allows you to compare the contents of two roles with a number of filters. It does not, however, allow you to compare two users. I often find myself in a situation where one user can see a tile or access some data that another cannot. How do you quickly troubleshoot this? Look at one user in Security Console, screenshot their roles, then look at the other user and spot the difference? That’s not particularly effective.
Our Solution
Our solution – and there may be others – is a quick dashboard. At the top are two prompts, one for each user that you are comparing. When you hit ‘Apply’ three columns refresh –
- Roles only the first user has
- Roles on the second user has
- Roles both users have
It allows you to see the differences in seconds, and you can copy/paste the results straight off the screen or download to Excel.
If you make it easily available from the Springboard then accessing it is super-easy:
The sharp eyed may notice that these are BIP reports and wonder why I’m not using the new Security Subject Area in OTBI. The reason is that I wanted Role Name, not Role Code. The former is harder to get from OTBI.
Screenshots and more
One of my pet peeves is a sloppy screenshot. I shudder if I’m sent a screenshot in a professional document that’s blurry, too zoomed out or stretched out of ratio. I cringe if I see a presentation with a screenshot that includes a stack of irrelevant extra info – it’s not necessary to include your Amazon shopping browser tabs or to advertise how many unread Yahoo emails you have.
As a result, I like a good screenshotting tool – one that allows you to accurately pick your screenshot regions. For years I’ve flitted, most recently with Greenshot, however, I’ve found a new favourite – ShareX. It’s open source, so free to use, and although it shares some of the same code as Greenshot it improves on it in a number of ways.
It has two features that I’ve found hugely useful – scrolling capture and OCR.
Scrolling Capture
Scrolling Capture is useful in web pages that are taller than your screen window. Previously I’d have to take multiple screenshots then stitch them together. Messy. ShareX does the scrolling and stitching for you.
OCR
OCR is reading text from an image. Retyping is time-consuming so this saves wasted effort, scanning through the image for words on your behalf and giving you the results as text.
Immediate Practical HCM Cloud Use-Case
Earlier today I had to produce a document showing the processes that we have scheduled. The grid in the Scheduled Processes page was about 3x screen heights high and there is no download to Excel/detach button. I was faced with either scrolling up and down and retyping the process names or having to find the back-end table, and neither would be particularly quick.
Enter ShareX. I activated it, clicked ‘scrolling capture’, clicked on the Scheduled Processes grid and away it went. It gave me a single image with the entire grid in. Then I activated ShareX again and clicked OCR, pointed it at the image and it gave me a table containing the text. Exactly what I needed in less than 60 seconds.
Weird Logon Redirect Issue
We hit a perplexing issue over the Christmas break at one of our clients. They had a user who could not log in and was getting a redirect issue that we’d not encountered before.
We checked it out, made sure his roles were valid etc and found:
- all other users could log in without any problems
- this one account was not working via Single sign-on
- after resetting his Oracle password and trying that method it failed with the same issue
- clearing cache/cookies/changing browsers/laptops made no difference
MS Edge said:
Hmm, we can’t reach this page
(but the URL was valid and worked for everyone else)
Chrome said:
This page isn’t working
Firefox said:
The page isn’t redirecting properly
It was this last message that got us thinking, as before timing out it did seem to go into a redirect loop.
Resolution
We couldn’t see any other issue so raised an SR with Oracle. After a bit of backwards-and-forwards, recording Fiddler traces etc they provided the answer. The user account had been manually created – I guess by someone copying-and-pasting – and there was a space on the end of the username.
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