Fusion HCM R8 - New Features - Text Replacement

Having worked for a long time on Fusion Applications, I find that customers really like the ability to use the page composer to change the look and feel of the system.  That's fine until the customer asks "Can I change all the occurrences of the word "Assignment" to "Job" please?".  Up to now, the answer to that question has always been, "Well, we could, but it will take forever, and do you know how many places that text might occur in the system?  It could be thousands".

But now, there is a brilliant new feature which allows you to search for text strings and find all the occurrences of it.  Then you can replace the text with your own.  But, it gets better.  More later.

So, let's step through this process.

First, as long as you have the correct roles, you will find a new entry on the navigator menu.  It's under a group called Customization and the workarea is called User Interface Text.

You must do this work in a sandbox.  If you try to do it outside a sandbox you'll get a warning message.

So, open a sandbox and then begin by searching for the text you want to change.  My examples in the following screenshots show the replacement of the text "Visa" with "Permit".  But, just imagine the number of hits you'll get on the word "Assignment"!

Press the Search and Replace button...

Then, select the text you want to replace and the replacement text.  You can choose to look for plural versions of the text too, or whether the text case should be used as part of the search criteria...

You can also look for the text in messages.  Now this is really powerful, because you would never be able to find every occurrence hidden away in the myriad messages in the system.

Next, you preview the potential changes.  This is where you see just how many places your text occurs!

Text....

and messages....

At this point, you can review the places the text was found, including the messages it is embedded into.  If you want to, you can select specific occurrences to change and leave the rest untouched, or you can manually change the results if you think they don't read correctly.

When you're happy with the potential changes you can save them.  As you did this in a sandbox, you then have the ability to control their deployment into the mainline system or export them to a sandbox in another environment.

This is a really powerful feature and one I can see we will be using a lot!