Introduction

If you’ve ever been knee-deep in testing or cutover cycles in Oracle Fusion Absence Management, chances are you’ve ended up with a flood of test absence entries. And as you know, deleting them one by one? Not fun. 😓

Oracle doesn’t offer a standard feature for bulk deletion of absence entries—but that didn’t stop us.

In this blog, we’ll walk you through a custom-built utility we developed using a BI report that filters absence entries and instantly generates an HDL file for deletion. All without touching a single row manually. 🔥

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💡 The Spark

This started off as a simple “What if?” during one of our test cycles. We needed a safer, faster, and more scalable way to clean up data.

The idea quickly became a working solution. This transformation was thanks to “Nimisha Pollenchery“. She is a brilliant technical mind who brought this vision to life. What you’ll see here is a fusion (pun intended!) of functional thinking and technical execution.

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🔧 The Challenge We Solved

Oracle Fusion Absence Management doesn’t have a native UI action for deleting absence entries in bulk.

So we created a custom BI report that allows:

• Smart filtering of absence entries by date, person, or type
• Direct HDL file generation
• Seamless integration with the existing HCM Data Loader process

The report includes:

• Absence Type: Choose from any defined absence category
• Person Number: Isolate specific employee records
• Start Date & End Date: Define the exact period to filter

These filters ensure you’re deleting only what you intend to—nothing more, nothing less.

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🚀 Step-by-Step Guide to Use the Report

1. Open the report and apply the required filters.
2. Click on “Apply” to fetch matching records.
3. The report dynamically generates the HDL content.
4. Click the gear icon → Export the output.
5. Save the file as: PersonAbsenceEntry.dat
6. Zip the file.
7. Upload it via Import and Load Data in Oracle Fusion HCM.

Just like that, the absence entries are deleted—in bulk.

📁 Ready-to-Use BI Catalog File – Download and Deploy

To make this solution immediately useful for other Oracle Fusion teams, we’re sharing the pre-developed BI catalog filethat includes everything you need:

✅ Report layout

✅ Filter parameters

✅ HDL content generator

You can download the catalog file directly from the link below and import it into your BI catalog.

Absence Entry Delete HDL.catalogDownload

🎬 Demo – How the End-to-End Flow Works

Follow these steps to import and use the pre-built report for bulk absence deletion:

1. Download the catalog file from the link above.
2. Navigate to Reports and Analytics in Oracle Fusion and unarchive the file into your preferred folder (e.g., /Shared Folders/Custom/HCM/AbsenceManagement).
3. Open the report and apply the necessary filters:
   • Absence Type
   • Person Number
   • Start Date and End Date
4. Click Apply to generate the HDL content.
5. Once the output is ready, click the gear icon → Export → Text.
6. Rename the exported file to: PersonAbsenceEntry.dat
7. Compress the .dat file into a .zip.
8. Go to Import and Load Data → HCM Data Loader, and upload the .zip file.
9. After successful import, navigate to the Absence screen to confirm the deletion of the selected entries.

🎯 That’s it—your absences are gone, in bulk, without manual edits or UI clicks!

📌 Where This Custom Solution Shines

• 🧪 Testing Environments – Reset your environment after test cases.
• 🔁 Data Migrations – Remove junk data or accidental loads.
• 🧼 Pre-Go-Live Cleanup – Wipe clean before refreshing production.

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🌟 Why This Matters

This is not a feature you’ll find in Oracle documentation—but it’s one that every functional consultant has wished for at some point.

The real win here? A clean, safe, and fully controlled way to manage bulk deletions without risking your production setup. It’s also a great example of how custom reports can fill the small but painful gaps that standard tools leave behind.

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🔚 Conclusion

This custom solution gave our team the edge in managing Absence Management test cycles more efficiently—and it can do the same for yours.

If you’ve ever thought, “There has to be a better way…”, this might just be it.