ROLES IN FUSION APPLICATIONS

There are various types of roles in Fusion Applications. This can get confusing at the very first glance, and the reader may find it complex when reading the Oracle Documentation. However, once understood the merit of each role type, you will then begin to appreciate the elegance of the design in Fusion Applications. To begin with, one must realise that Fusion Apps leverages Fusion Middleware's weblogic component. Therefore all the technology components defined in this article get deployed into Weblogic Server of fusion middleware.

Firstly, what is a role?

A role is some kind of privilege that you can assign to the user allowing them to perform certain type actions in the application.

As you can see from above, the role only allows you to grant some privilege, it does not stop you from doing something.

For reader familiar with Oracle EBS, we can assign responsibilities to the users. The responsibilities consist of menu’s that reference a function. After granting the responsibility, you can set exclusions from the responsibility too.

However in Fusion Applications, you can not set the exclusions from a user. You can only say this user can do x, y & z things in the application.

Let us walk through the different types of roles in Fusion Applications

Duty Roles

These are also known as Application Roles. These are the granular duties performed by the individuals. Examples are Invoice Creation Duty, Invoice Approval Duty, GL Journal Entry Duty, GL Journal Approval Duty, GL Journal Posting Duty etc. It is like saying to a new staff that you can perform xyz duties within your job or it is your duty to perform x y z things in your organization. The name of this role has the suffix _DUTY. The duty role provides access to screens, reports & dashboards via privileges and provide access to data behind the screens using data security.

Job roles

These are also known as Enterprise roles. These roles get mapped to one or more duty roles, because a person that takes a job in a company, then they are meant to perform several duties. For example, a HR Recruiter Job will have a duty to scan resumes submitted and place an offer to the individual. The name of this role has the suffix _JOB. Some examples are Account Payables Manager Job, General Ledger Accounting Manager Job etc. Job roles are also referred to as external roles.

Abstract Roles

These are also known as Enterprise roles. These roles are associated with a user irrespective of the Job they perform within an enterprise. Therefore abstract roles are at a higher level spanning various jobs, and hence their name abstract. Examples are Employee Role, Temporary Staff role etc. An organization might decide to automatically assign an Expense Entry Duty Role to all the Employees, and likewise may decide to auto provision Timesheet Entry Duty Role to all the contract workers. Job roles can inherit abstract roles, for example a Human Resource Administrator job role can inherit the Employee abstract role because it is likely that an HR Administrator will be an Employee of the company, and thus should automatically have access to entering timesheets and claiming expenses. Similar to job roles, the abstract roles are also referred to as external roles.

Data Roles

This will be discussed in a separate article.