TRAINING (PS-9) - PeopleSoft Application Development - Part6 (Step-2: Create Field Definition - Effective Dates)

Step-1: Create Field Definition - Effective Dates

• The EFFDT (Effective Date) field has special properties related to the processing of effective dates on rows and should only be used when needed.
• EFFDT only on record definitions where you want to maintain data history—future, current, and past - to store rows of data in sequence.
• For effective-dated rows, you can only have one current row of data, but multiple occurrences of future and history.

Understanding Effective Dates
Effective dates allow you to keep historical, current, and future information in tables.  You can use the information to look at what's happened up to now and plan for the future.

Future - Data rows that have effective dates greater than the system date—usually today's date.
Current -  The data row with the most recent effective date closest to today's (system) date, but not a future date.  Only one row is the current row.
History - Data rows that have effective dates less than the current data row.

To enable you to track an accurate history of all your effective-dated information, the system invokes special logic when you access a panel associated with a record definition that contains EFFDT.  The menu action type that you select will dictate whether you can access the row type and what you can do with each type of row.

Action Type	View	Change	Insert New Rows
Update/Display	Current, Future	Future only	Effective Date Greater Than the Current Row
Update/Display All	History, Current, Future	Future only	Effective Date Greater Than the Current Row
Correction	History,Current, Future	All Existing Rows	Add New Rows with No Effective Date Restrictions

Update/Display Mode, you can view only current and future rows.  You can't access history.
Update/Display All Mode, you can view all History, Current and Future rows.

Correction Mode, you can do it all.  View, change, and insert rows of data regardless of the effective date.