User Preferences in Oracle E-Business Suite

You probably know the User Preferences link at the right top of your E-Business Suite homepage. On this page the users can change some of the behaviour, number and date formats of their Oracle E-Business Suite sessions.

By default, every user has the default settings/preferences as being applied to the instance but they have the opportunity to change these settings for their own purpose. E-Business Suite maintains these changes as Profile Options on the specific user level.

To know what an overridden setting is for an user is for example handy when you want to apply these format to your custom reports. Of course, if there is nothing changed by the user the default system settings are used.

Find below a small list of User Preferences with the related profile option name for you to use in your own SQL or Profile Option API call.

• Default Application LanguageProfile Option Name: ICX_LANGUAGE
  User Profile Option Name: ICX: Language
• Accessibility Features Profile Option Name: ICX_ACCESSIBILITY_FEATURES
  User Profile Option Name: Self Service Accessibility Features
• Territory
  Profile Option Name: ICX_TERRITORY
  User Profile Option Name: ICX: Territory
• Date FormatProfile Option Name: ICX_DATE_FORMAT_MASK
  User Profile Option Name: ICX: Date format mask
• Timezone
  Profile Option Name: CLIENT_TIMEZONE_ID
  User Profile Option Name: Client Timezone
• Number FormatProfile Option Name: ICX_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS
  User Profile Option Name: ICX: Numeric characters
• Currency
  Profile Option Name: ICX_PREFERRED_CURRENCY and JTF_PROFILE_DEFAULT_CURRENCY
  User Profile Option Name: ICX: Preferred Currency and JTF_PROFILE_DEFAULT_CURRENCY
• Client Character EncodingProfile Option Name: FND_NATIVE_CLIENT_ENCODING
  User Profile Option Name: FND: NATIVE CLIENT ENCODING
• Start PageProfile Option Name: APPLICATIONS_START_PAGE
  User Profile Option Name: Applications Start page

So, you can query the FND_PROFILE_OPTION_VALUES table from the APPLSYS schema to find an overridden value for for example the Number Format preference for an user by using the below SQL:

SELECT
    VAL.PROFILE_OPTION_VALUE
FROM
    APPLSYS.FND_PROFILE_OPTION_VALUES VAL,
    APPLSYS.FND_PROFILE_OPTIONS OPT,
    APPLSYS.FND_USER FUSER
WHERE
    VAL.PROFILE_OPTION_ID = OPT.PROFILE_OPTION_ID
    AND VAL.LEVEL_VALUE = FUSER.USER_ID
    AND OPT.PROFILE_OPTION_NAME = 'ICX_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS'
    AND VAL.LEVEL_ID = 10004 -- USER LEVEL
    AND FUSER.USER_NAME = 'SCHAIKC';

Or call the profile option API to get the value of the user:

SELECT FND_PROFILE.VALUE_SPECIFIC('ICX_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS',<USER_ID>) FROM DUAL;

I hope the above can help when you just wonder where those preferences are. Feel free to comment!