Oracle Financial Services Lending and Leasing application is based on Oracle Fusion Middleware. User interfaces are implemented using Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) and standard Java technologies. Business intelligence frameworks provide a number of reporting capabilities. Each of these areas of the application can be customized and extended to suit your business needs.

Within this guide, the term customizing means to change a standard (existing) artifact. For example, you can add an attribute to a standard business object, or you can change what is displayed on a standard view page. The term extending means to create a completely new artifact, such as a custom business object or custom view page. For customizations and extensions of this application, there are two basic scenarios: personalization and design time customizations and extensions.

Personalization

Personalization refers to the changes that every end user of the application can make to certain artifacts in the user interface (UI) at runtime. These changes remain for that user each time that user logs into the application. Personalization includes changes based on user behavior (such as changing the width of a column in a table).

Design time customizations and extensions

Design time customizations and extensions include more complex changes, such as creating new business objects or creating new view pages, and they require deployment into the runtime environment. Design time customizations are done by Java developers using Oracle JDeveloper. The customizations are then uploaded or deployed to a running instance of the application.

Most customizations, whether a personalization an end user makes, or a change a developer makes using JDeveloper to create new source code, are stored in a business metadata repository. Because these customizations are kept separate from the base code, you can safely upgrade your application without overwriting or needing to redo your changes.

Customizations for the UI and for entity components are created in layers, meaning that you can create them for specific industry, or for specific region or sites, and the changes will be shown only when applicable. For more information about the metadata dictionary and customization layers, see section 2.2 - Understanding Customization Layers.