In Ap Invoice Interface why need validation.

[kalyankmohanta]

Why Need Validation and staging table .

[admin]

Just like mouth and teeth before food reaches stomach. thanks

[joythomas]

kalyankmohanta
Admin has provided a perfect answer in nutshell Let me provide some details about Interfaces .
Oracle application uses interfaces to import external business information and extract information from oracle application to external systems.
There are two types of interfaces, inbound interface and outbound interface. Inbound interface is used to receive business information from the external system and will be imported into the Oracle applications through Oracle provided Application Program Interface (API) or Customized Interface Programs. Oracle has provided interfaces like Payable Open Interface for importing Accounts Payable Invoices. If there is no Oracle provided interface, you will create an Interface to import the Business information into the Oracle applications. Out bound Interface is used to extract the business information from the Oracle for the external systems and both of the interfaces are submitted through the concurrent programs.

Normally a custom program will be created to import the data, validate data for the Inbound Interfaces. SQl Loader or UTL File will be used for loading the data into your custom tables and into the Oracle provided interface Tables and a custom program will be created for the Outbound interfaces.

Normally the Interface data files are in coma delimited or data separated by Pipes or in X12, XML, Excel, CSV formats. All the files have a header record and Trailer Records for the control of the data from the external systems.

You will create staging tables for inbound and outbound interfaces and will have data validations. Staging tables are used to hold the data before loading into the oracle provided interface tables. You can use the data in the staging table for your data validation. Staging table can be used to update Oracle application information Egg. in case of Payable Open Interface and the external system is not providing the accounting information , You can update the invoice records with the correct accounting information based on a business requirement after identifying the pre -defined values in the data files . You can use the data in staging table for creating audit reports with number of interface files , records , process status ( proceed and failed ), , types of errors depends up on the your requirement , You can send back the file to the source with error information for correcting the data file.

All the inbound data finally populated in to Oracle applications. Oracle application is a financial system, No business organization like to populate their financial system with wrong data. All the Oracle provided API has it own validations. Oracle rejects the data which is not passed its data validation. You can see the details of the rejection in the out put of the Interface programs. Correcting the interface data involves research and it can delay your business activities and this involves man hours and some instances the wrong data can corrupt the data in Oracle applications and the cleaning the data is a complex activity . This is the reason, when the data is imported into oracle application all the data will be validated before loading into the interface Tables. Normally the data is validated for data validations and business validations. Egg: for data validations. One of the columns in your staging table expects numeric values and you always validate the data of the column to make sure that the values are numeric. Normally all the data elements of the data file will be validated prior to loading into Oracle Provided Interface tables.
Business validation: Invoice number ? Oracle open interface only validate whether the interfaced invoice number ( duplicate Invoice Number ) is already exists for a specific supplier and oracle accepts number or character or alpha numeric values for Invoice number , where as if you have a business requirement like Invoice number should have pre- defined alphabetic character to search the invoices easily or a reporting requirement ,Your custom program validate that Invoice number has the specific character values .
Let me know you have any specific questions.

Thanks
Joy Thomas