Questions Concerning Work Centre

Has anyone found the employee work center very cumbersome to work with? We only use it for standard Peoplesoft batch programs to display error msgs. We would rather have the errors display in the batch report.

The problem we have is the following:
1) Sometimes msgs are cryptic - have no idea what error means.

2) You have to drill down into the workcenter job to see the actual error.

3) Error has to be sent to a specific person. What if that person is away? Can I have multiple people see a single person's work center?

4) Can I forward work center msgs for specific jobs to other individuals? Only want errors to be sent out.

Do most people use the Foundations manual to properly set up their employee work center or do you use the solution notes from the Peoplesoft web site.

Did any of you have to do any special configuration with the employee work center before you went live?

We have gone to the Solutions web site and downloaded every document we found on the employee workcenter. Secondly we went to the Documents web site and found some information there (Foundations Manual).

End users find the employee work center very cumbersome to use so is there a way I could send the work center email directly to our lotus notes web site so they don't have to look at the work centre at all?

Just asking for general feedback regarding employee work center and what people have done to configure the work center in their company. We do not do any online workflow approval processing except for in Purchasing (Distribution) area.

Cathy,

at our company we generally do not use the Work Center unless trying to resolve a problem and find the error messages. As you state it is poorly designed for communicating information to the end-user.

Regards,

I find the work center a bit cumbersome also. Does anyone know in which tables those message are stored? It might be easy to get the messages from that table and present them in a better manner.

Thanks,
Daniel

Daniel,

Other posts on the List have expressed similar sentiments. Have a look at this post from Dave Schleicher.

Some of the tables involved are:

F01131 PPAT Message Control File
F01131M JDEM Multi Level Message
F01132 PPAT Message Text File
F01133 PPAT Message Detail File

To work out what is happening and how the tables fit together, run some jdedebug logs while accessing the work centre.

And God help the developer who tries to retrieve and print the data field TSV from the F01131M table. This field contains the important error message details such as order number, line number etc.

TSV is a VARLEN (variable length) data item. It is quite a task handling such variable length fields. Even normal assignment statements such as assigning the BC value to a variable of the same type fails.

But if you wish to have the error messages print on a report, it should not be too difficult provided the above field is properly handled.