From my previous post on TXK rollup patch, you already know the significance of adctxinf.tmp file in $AD_TOP/admin/template directory. It has wealth of information about different XML tags in the Context XML file of an Apps 11i instance. In relation to the same file, now I want to share with you all a small XSL (XML style sheet) file I wrote back in 2005. It makes adctxinf.tmp much more readable; all tags are presented in a tabular format in the browser.

For users of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, go directly to this link to view the file. Those of you who want to have an offline copy, download that file and vasu.xsl to same directory and open adctxinf.xml in any app of your choice. Its just a very simple XSL file, but it should make life a little easier. My goal when I wrote this stylesheet was to make the Context XML file itself much more human-readable. But I never got much time to work on that.

It’s true — XML is for machines; HTML is for humans.

I was very pleased when I heard about Oracle adding pivot functionality in select statements. Finally — we wouldn’t have to copy the data to a spreadsheet or code a ton of sum(case when col1 = 'X' then amount else 0 end) total_X for each column we would want to display.

I am basically looking for three things in a pivot-style query:

1. the ability to specify which column will be pivoted as one or more columns in the resulting query
2. row subtotals
3. column subtotals

The first item is the only one that really matters. I can work around the other two, so let’s get started.

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