Most useless enhancement in R12?
February 26th, 2009 MattJust a quick post, since it’s been a while – I’ve been VERY busy recently, and am only now taking a decent break with the family.
Anyway – reading some of the R12 documentation yesterday, I saw that there is a new “enhancement” to Workflow Notifications in R12, which I suggest is the most useless enhancement for a while.
In R12, there is now a facility to use a document attribute as the subject of an email, as long as the subject that is generated is less than 240 characters long. The “idea” seems to be so that you can “easily” include code top make the subject of a Notification dynamic. Now, forgive me if I’m wrong, but couldn’t you do that in EVERY version of Workflow, by using a text attribute??
What benefit does a document for a subject line give you? I can think of only one – you no longer need to include a PL/SQL activity within the process to set the attribute that is used for the Notification subject. That’s the only one I can think of – and personally, I would rather see an explicit step in the process which says “Set Subject” (or the like) rather than hiding the place where the subject is determined.
I can’t see a situation where I will ever be looking to use a document API instead of setting a text attribute, but you never know – if someone can come up with a reason why you should use it, please let me know! 
