Connecting EPM Cloud Planning to Apex with Rest API: POST Substitution Variables Part 1 of 2

In my previous post I talked about using Oracle Apex to dynamically pull through substitution Variables from Oracle Planning.

Our Objective:

Here I will walk you through how you can edit these variables in Apex and have it push these changes straight into Planning, ideal if you need to manage multiple environments and want to keep all the variables in sync.

Lets Begin:

My Starting point for this walk-through will be the end of the last one as the same steps are required, so if you haven't done so already please visit my previous post on how to create a simple GET table of your substitution variables so we can begin to manage them from Apex too.

So having followed my previous post you should now have in your application a report like the one below that displays your application's substitution variables.

Your first task in letting you manage these variables from Apex is found back in the "Web Source Modules" page within "Shared Components". You'll want to click on the Module that we created earlier and from here head over to the "Operations" tab where you should see the "GET" operation that was made during the "Discovery" phase of the module's initial creation.

Here we want to click "Add Operation", for this new operation we want to have the HTTP Method as "POST", the Database Operation as "Insert Row" and the Request Body Template as the following:

{
    "items": [{
        "name": "#NAME#",
        "value": "#VALUE#",
        "planType": "#PLANTYPE#"
    }]
}

For future reference this body template information can be found on the Oracle Rest API Reference Guide which may help you perform other Rest calls to Oracle Planning.

The URL Pattern should auto-fill with "." but if not you can also insert this here, then click "Create".

Once this has been created, go back into the editor for the "POST" operation you just made and you will now be able to add "Operation Parameters", we want to add 4 new parameters, the required details of which are listed below.

1)
Type: Request / Response Body
Name: NAME
Value:
Direction: In
Static: Off
Required: Yes
2)
Type: Request / Response Body
Name: VALUE
Value:
Direction: In
Static: Off
Required: Yes
3)
Type: Request / Response Body
Name: PLANTYPE
Value:
Direction: In
Static: Off
Required: Yes
4)
Type: HTTP Header
Name: Content-Type
Value: application/json
Direction: In
Static: Off
Required: No

Once submitted the last thing to check is the "Static ID" of the web source module, this can be found under the "Advanced" tab, this should default to the name of the web module, but if not, or if you wish to change it you will need to type in an appropriate unique name here which we will be referencing later.

Once completed, click "Apply Changes" and we're ready to move onto Stage 2.

That concludes part 1, we now have our Web Source Module up and running and in part 2 we will be looking at how to build a bridge between this module and the interactive report in our application so as to POST changes back to Oracle Planning.

I hope this information proves useful to you and you can find part 2 of this post here.

You can read many other useful Oracle EPM Cloud and Netsuite ERP blogs posted by my colleagues at Brovanture here

Thank you for reading.

-Richard