Tech – Lead Interview Question

The following are the list of consolidated questions, which were asked during Honeywell
Tech-Lead Interview.

There were 2 levels of Interview.

1st Level – Arun – Has 4 years PeopleSoft Experience in PeopleTools, HRMS –
Interviewed for 35 Minutes
2nd Level – Shankar – Has 6 years PeopleSoft Experience in PeopleTools, HRMS, CRM
and Finance - Interviewed for 1 Hour and 5 Minutes

Had Introduction and started interview after given a short briefing about my experience

SQR

1. What is an SQC and why is it used

Stored procedures or functions - reusable.

2. What is the difference between Begin-Report and Begin-Program?

Begin-program controls the order of execution. Only 1 begin-program in the

SQR. Begin-report was there in the older version.

3. Table XYZ doesn’t have key field and the SQR using the table XYZ has a
performance issue. How can you solve it?

4. How do u read data from a file? (CSV)

begin-procedure main
input $iname 'Input file'
open $iname as {IFILE} for-reading record={IMAX}:vary

while 1
read {IFILE} into $line:{IMAX}

5. How do you get fetch the data from the flat file and load it into the database using
SQR?

6. What are the file types is possible to read from SQR and how you have handled it.

.csv, .txt, .dat

7. In which format do you expect the input file to be?

8. How do u handle downloading data to a flat file using SQR?

 9. How do you validate the given input values?

Input &str maxlen=3 type=char. This way maximum length and the type entered
can be checked.

10. You are using the update statement in the SQR and you ran the SQR, how do you
do check whether the update is done correctly.

Backend check – not sure.

11. Given two tables (Employment & Accomplishment), if you want to retrieve only
one row from accomplishment for employees from Employment table, what is the
code used

Loop=1

12. Can you read file placed in ftp folder? How

13. What are the DDL statement you can use in SQR

Drop, create, commit.

PS Query

14. Can you tell how to provide if else condition in the PS query

Expressions – case in case sql server, or decode in case of oracle DB.

15. To retrieve common data from two tables, what will you use?

union

PeopleCode

16. Difference between FieldEdit and FieldChange

Fieldedit – when the field value is changed, this is triggered first. Validation.

Fieldchange – after field edit. If after changes something else should happen based on
this value, such code is written.

17. In which PeopleCode Event can we sequence the Emplid’s

 18. Explain the PeopleCode event in the sequence component processor is processed

(Component Processor Flow)

19. What is a component processor

The Component Processor is the PeopleTools runtime engine that controls processing
of the application from the time the end-user requests a component from an
application menu through the time that the database is updated and processing of the
component is complete.

Application Engine

20. What is a state record?

The Application Engine State Record is the method by which you allocate variables
for your Application Engine program, and it is also the method by which Section,
Steps, and Actions pass values to subsequent program steps. You can think of State
Records in Application Engine as global variables without scope limiting rules. Ends
with aet. One default set in the AE property.

21. How can you call another Application Engine from one Application Engine?

Call app engine in the peoplecode of the 1st AE.

Call section option.

22. Explain restart logic

 Application Engine has the built-in ability to save a program state and restart where it stopped
processing in the case of an abend. We refer to this feature as Restart.
It's important to understand that simply leaving Disable Restart unselected on the Advanced
tab on the Program Properties dialog doesn't guarantee that your program is restartable. In
fact, that's just the easy part. You need to design your program appropriately for a restart to
work successfully.
By default, Application Engine doesn't perform a COMMIT until an entire program
successfully completes. It's up to program developers to set any individual Commits where
appropriate. At the Section level, you can choose to Commit after each Step in that Section.
And, at the Step level, you can require or defer COMMITs for individual Steps, or you can
increase the COMMIT frequency within a Step to n iterations of a looping action within a Step,
such as a Do Select or Do While.
The Commit level you select, plays a major role in the Restart functionality of a program.
Each time that Application Engine issues a Commit with Restart enabled, it records the
current state of the program. The recording of the current state that Application Engine
performs is referred to as a checkpoint.
So, the program behavior changes depending on whether you have Restart enabled or
disabled. If you have Restart enabled, whenever there is a commit, Application Engine also
performs a checkpoint beforehand. When you have Restart disabled Application Engine only
performs a commit.
The ability for Application Engine to "remember" what Steps have already completed and
which Steps have not, is attributed to an important record called AERUNCONTROL—keyed
by Process Instance.
However, there are special programs for which you may want to disable Restart. For
example, suppose one the following traits are true for a particular program:
• It's doing row-by-row processing.
• You don't want the overhead involved with Application Engine performing a
checkpoint during the program run.
• You're committing after N iterations of a looping construct within a Step, and the
SELECT statement driving the loop is composed in such a way that if the program
abended and then started again, it would ignore transactions that were already
processed in the previous program run. In this sense, the program handles the restart
internally in that Application Engine treats each start of a program as a "fresh" start
instead of restarting a previous instance.

PeopleTools

23. What is the difference between state record and derived work record

State records are used as variables in AE. Derived/ work records are used in
Peoplecode. A state record can be a derived record.
Using a work record as your Application Engine State Record means that the values in
the Work record cannot be committed. Commits will happen as directed, but any values
in Work records are not retained after a commit.
 Using a "real" record as your Application Engine State Record will preserve the values in
the State Record on commit, and the committed values are available in the event of a
restart.

24. What are the mandatory fields in a temporary table?

Temporary Tables, also referred to as Temp Tables, can be a very important asset for
many of your Application Engine programs. Typically, temporary tables store transient or
"intermediate results" during a program run.
You also use Temporary Tables to improve performance. For example, if you find that
multiple times during a run the program accesses a small subset of rows from a much
larger table, you can insert the necessary rows into a temporary table as an initialization
task. Then the program accesses the data residing in the smaller temporary table rather
than the large application table. This technique is similar to reading the data into an array
in memory, except that the data never leaves the database, which is an important
consideration when the program employs a set-based processing algorithm.
PeopleSoft recommends that you insert the PROCESS_INSTANCE field as a key into
the temporary tables you intend to use with Application Engine. Application Engine
expects temporary table records to contain the PROCESS_INSTANCE field.
When all instances of a temporary table are in use and the Temp Table runtime options
are set to "Continue," PeopleTools will insert rows into the base table using
PROCESS_INSTANCE as a key. If you opt not to include PROCESS_INSTANCE as a
key field in a temporary table, you should change the Temp Table runtime options to
"Abort" in the appropriate Application Engine programs.

25. What is the difference between Grid and Scroll Area? When will you use what?
Explain with scenario

Grids are tables consisting of navigation bars, columns, column headings, rows,
and row headings. You can use a grid instead of a scroll area or scroll bar to
manage multi-row sets of data.

When table kind of feature is required grid can be used.

26. What is a scroll bar?

Scroll area in 8 was scroll bar in 7.5

27. What are the classes available in PeopleSoft?

(Field, record has to be present in answer)

Field, record, grid, page, message, row, rowset, search, SQL. Tree, CI, array, AE
section, file, query, process request etc

28. Tell the steps involved in creating a page and accessing in PIA
 (Build & test should be predominant)

field definition
record definition
build record
page definition
component – insert page into compo
set search record for the compo
give access thru permission list, roles, user profiles.
Test via pia.

Component Interface

29. How do you test CI?

1.Open the component interface in Application Designer.

2.Select Tools, Test Component Interface from the Application Designer menu.

You can also right-click anywhere in the component interface view and select Test
Component Interface. The Test Component dialog appears. This dialog displays the
key structures (in the left-hand columns) for getting, creating, or finding an instance
of the component interface. The right-hand columns provide a place for you to enter
sample key values for testing.

30. What are the default methods available?

Cancel, create, get, find and save.

Others

31. What will you prefer SQR/AE. Why?

32. Question about Process Scheduler and Run control page

33. What is fit-gap analysis?

What is there in the available system Vs What is required. Identifies the areas to be
customized.

34. How will you migrate object from one instance from another instance

App designer.
Put the objects in project. Run compare report. Set the upgrade properties.

Tools - > Upgrade -> Copy

Enter the new database name , user id and password.
35. What are the Instances you have worked with
Dev - > Test -> UAT -> Prod

36. Question related to Data Mover

37. What is the maximum data file you have worked – Inbound / Outbound

38. What is the maximum database size you have worked

39. What is upgrade and how it is done?

(When I said about Object Inventory, question came like how the object inventory
was arrived – need to tell about keep/drop analysis)

40. If the custom built business process is available in higher version, what is the
precaution you will do during your upgrade.

Will not be copied. Have to manually redo – not sure.