Aron's Tech Blog

Oracle has announced that they are ending support for SHA-1 and migrating all it’s products to be SHA-2 compliant. Today they have released the information needed in order to accomplish this.
TCC-TCB SHA-2_CustomerDocument_Final is the Oracle white paper on the migration. read more »

A shout out to Kelly Amott for bringing this to resolution. I’ve always wondered what the difference between the the requisition reopen and reactivate operations and there’s not a bunch in the documentation that I’ve seen that would explain it. He got the answer from a case and was kind enough to share.

Update and FYI – To take the req off hold I was using the Requisition – reopen spec. Oracle advised that reopen is for cancelled reqs. The specification I needed to be using is the Requisition – reactivate.

Occasionally I get the question if you can update candidate EEO information. The answer is yes but it’s tricky. The key is in Doc ID 1047686.1 which states:

To import Diversity Answers, a unique ID is necessary for both Question and PossibleAnswer. Unfortunately, the Code does not enforce uniqueness, so sometimes another field is needed to use in imports. The field Number is available for both PossibleAnswer and Question entities even if it isn’t presented in the feature pack. To use them, just drag another field from the entity and edit the Path to Number.

Run an export on Possible Answer and Question numbers in order to know what IDs to use in your imports.

I ran across an issue where a client had usernames that were all supposed to be lower but somehow wound up as a mixed case username.
The SQL we would use would work out something like this…

Select
Number,
Username,
LOWER(Username)
WHERE
Username != LOWER(Username)

To illustrate this here is the export specification that would return the above mentioned in TCC, name of file CandidateExportTestLower_sq.xml
Contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<quer:query productCode="RC1501" model="http://www.taleo.com/ws/tee800/2009/01" projectedClass="Candidate" locale="en" mode="CSV" csvheader="true" largegraph="true" preventDuplicates="false" xmlns:quer="http://www.taleo.com/ws/integration/query">
	<quer:subQueries/>
	<quer:projections>
		<quer:projection>
			<quer:field path="Number"/>
		</quer:projection>
		<quer:projection>
			<quer:field path="Credentials,Username"/>
		</quer:projection>
		<quer:projection alias="UsernameLower">
   <quer:customFunction name="LOWER">
      <quer:field path="Credentials,Username"/>
   </quer:customFunction>
</quer:projection>
	</quer:projections>
	<quer:projectionFilterings/>
	<quer:filterings>
		<quer:filtering>
	<quer:notEqual>
		<quer:field path="Credentials,Username"/>
		<quer:customFunction name="LOWER">
			<quer:field path="Credentials,Username"/>
		</quer:customFunction>
	</quer:notEqual>
</quer:filtering>
	</quer:filterings>
	<quer:sortings/>
	<quer:sortingFilterings/>
	<quer:groupings/>
	<quer:joinings/>
</quer:query>

I don’t know why but I can never figure out what the date should be when importing it.
It needs to be the format of:
YYYY-DD-MM

Turns out there is a 30 character limit on aliases.

There are three items that we need to take a look at in regards to upgrading TCC.

The first in the version of your current zone in relation to Recruiting, Transitions and Performance. These are usually in sync with one another and denoted by the year released and an A/B version of the release (e.g. 14A, 14B, 15A). This information can be ascertained from the GUI by clicking resources > about.
This version will be the target version for TCC so if your zone is on 15A, we’ll be upgrading TCC to version 15A.

The next item of concern is the installation of the the latest version of TCC and corresponding Application Data Model (Feature Packs). These can be obtained from https://edelivery.oracle.com and a tutorial of the installation can be found here.
TCC versions can be installed side by side with no issues. This assumes that you will utilize a separate directory for each of the installations. The TaleoConnectClient.bat file will be what needs to be called from the batch files in order to utilize the new version, this file is in the root of the installation directory.

The last item we need to address is the version of the scripts themselves. Every script (*_sq.xml = export, *_ld.xml = import, *_cfg.xml = configuration) will have an attribute called productCode in the XML file. It will look like this:
productCode=”RC1401″ for imports and exports
and
RC1401 for configurations.
These codes are documented on the Oracle support site in Doc ID 1044000.1
In this case we can see that these integrations were built under 14A. These scripts will have to be manually updated via a text editor to change the RC1401 to RC1501 which corresponds to TCC 15A. It is highly recommended that this is done first on a staging server pointed towards the staging zone. The issue that could possibly occur is that if any fields have been deprecated and those are associated with an integration, it will cause the integration to fail. Conversely, if new fields are added you will need the version of TCC that the enhancement was released in order to utilize the new field.

Sometimes I get logged onto a server and I run something manually and the screen is all messed up…

This comes from the Monitoring Location folder in the monitoring tab of the config file. If it is set to ‘monitor’ (no quotes) all is good as long as you have Create HTML monitoring files checked under the Monitoring Type…

I think one of the things that sets TCC apart from other integration engines is the ability to utilize pretty much any Oracle SQL function by using the customFunction feature. You simply declare the function you would like to use in the name attribute.
I ran across a situation where I needed to use the GREATEST function on two fields and was able to declare that function and pass the parameters exactly as you would if you were writing it in SQL developer as seen below.

<quer:filtering xmlns:quer="http://www.taleo.com/ws/integration/query">
<quer:lrd>
<quer:customFunction name="GREATEST">
<quer:field path="Process,Steps,EndDate"/>
<quer:field path="ProfileInformation,Application,CSWLatestDate"/>
</quer:customFunction>
</quer:lrd>
</quer:filtering>