Customer Form, Party Issue: How To Inactivate / Reactivate a Party? (Doc ID 883461.1)

Last updated on JANUARY 09, 2023

Applies to:

Goal

A short recap of the history of the Customer form may provide a bit of insight to its design and functionality, and will help you understand why you are restricted from manipulating Party data in the Customer Standard form.

Prior to Trading Community Architecture (TCA)
In release 10.7 and 11.0, the data model surrounding the creation and maintenance of a customer record was owned by Oracle Receivables (AR). Within AR, when you created a record for a customer, you were creating a Customer Account. You need a Customer Account because you want to transact business with a customer. For example, you needed to create a Customer Account for ABC Corporation because they bought something from you and you need to send them an invoice. Later on you would create adjustments, credit memos, receipts and other AR activities against ABC Corporation.

After Trading Community Architecture (TCA)
With the advent of TCA, everything pertaining to the customer data model was moved out of AR and into TCA. Further, the customer data model was enhanced immensely to track and monitor customer information that was needed across all E-Business Suite applications and not just AR. One piece of information that TCA could now track is the concept of a Party. There are many notes regarding TCA that discuss the concept of a Party. You might find <Note 220383.1>, TCA Parties FAQ Release 11i useful. For purposes of the discussion in the note, let's just say that a Party is a bigger entity than a Customer Account.

Now let's go back to Customer Form within AR.
When you create a new customer, you are actually creating a Customer Account. However, because the data is now kept within TCA, the structure of data must adhere to the rules defined within TCA. One of these rules is, You can define a Party without creating Customer Accounts for it, but a Customer Account always had to be tied to one and only one Party. In compliance with this rule, when you create a Customer Account in AR, the code automatically takes care of creating the Party associated to the Customer Account for you.

At the AR level, you will only transact at the Customer Account level and never the Party level. This is why in the Customer form owned by AR, you will not have access to manipulate the status of the Party. To change the status of a Party you would have to access the data via a CRM application, such as: Telesales, or Customers Online.

Solution

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