Securing or validating account combinations is an important topic to discuss during the implementation of Oracle Applications. Basically, two methods are available to perform security: security rules and cross-validation.This document covers a third method of account combination validation: I call it 'Conditional Flexfield Validation'. This method is particularly useful to secure the account and sub-account combinations.

The document is available in the Downloads section, under General Ledger section, or press the link below.

How to create conditional flexfields (629.5 kB)

Before using this document, I need to say that the mentioned setup is not officially approved by Oracle Support! The Flexfield User Guide is clear: it is not allowed to use WHERE clauses in the accounting flexfield. I have submitted an earlier version of this document to Oracle Support and asked their opinion about it, and whether it is supported or not.

Besides the fact that they really appreciated to be involved in this kind of discussions beforehand, they came up with the same statements from the Flexfield User Guide, and concluded that they could not support this solution.

The only solution given in the User Guide is to create a view on database (table) level, and refer to the view in the setup of the table-validated value set. In that case, the WHERE-clause is stored in the view, and not in the value set anymore. But as far as I know it is not possible to include the $FLEX$ placeholder in a database view.