After a brief hiatus with some other articles that were in the pipeline, we are back looking at the wonderful subject of substitutions in Oracle Intelligent Advisor. What is number five on our top ten ways to use them? Let’s find out!

#5 – Substitutions using Gender

This concept has been around for a long time in Oracle Policy Modeling and I am surprised and disappointed by how many people do not know it exists (and therefore spend a chunk of time messing with custom labels. I do understand that it does not fit every scenario however (as you will see in a later episode in this article series).

Create a text attribute, and call it something practical like the gender of the person. This assumes that you have an entity called the person that has an identifying attribute called the person and that you have set the following information on that attribute:

I personally think that documentation is a bit weak here – it could make it clearer that the substitution based on gender needs this kind of double-barrelled possessive structure. Now we can add the various elements to the Screen.

Don’t forget to add a drop-down with a list of values. They should be Male and Female. Depressingly, there is no built-in defined option for non-binary so you have to build it yourself:

And now you can see your substitution in action in the Debugger. Notice how the label in the third attribute question text changes automatically as I change the gender in the previous attribute.

Join us in a couple of days for more substitution fun!