Siebel Consultant

Since my knowledge of Siebel is far from complete, I’m still learning new stuff every day. Yesterday I was working on a little requirement that said that the tab order on the Service Request applet should have a logical order. So I set the tab layout and when I tested it, everything was ok, but when I wanted to create a new Service Request, the cursor automatically showed up in the Contact field instead of the Contract field which was tab n° 1.

After looking in supportweb and asking my colleagues for advice I stumbled upon the DefaultFocus_New Applet User Property where you can specify the field that should have the focus on creating a new record.

Who know’s how much time I would have spent looking to solve this problem if I didn’t found this user property.

Today I was modifying an Email template which is used to send out Opportunity details. The template consists of several template items that already existed but needed to be changed.

On of the template items displays several fields of the account linked to the opportunity such as Account Name, Address fields and some other. As I make my changes and test them I see that the field [Street Address 2] doesn’t show the value of the field but just the name of the field.

I switch to Tools to see if I’m using the correct field and see that the field name is not Street Address 2 but Street Address Line 2. So I change the name of the field in my template item (by hand, not by copy/past) and try again but still no value is showing.

Back to tools to check the name of the field and then I saw my mistake. The name of the field is not Street Address Line 2 but Stree Address Line 2. I immediately think of a typo from me but when I do an About Record for that field I see that it’s a Siebel Vanilla field and that the type is from one of the developers of Siebel.

I was glad to see that even those guys at Siebel make stupid typo’s and do see them.

A while ago I was discussing with a colleague that we couldn’t find a very good forum about Siebel and that it would be convenient that we would have a forum for all the employees of our company.

And then I suggested, why not make one ourself. And since I already had a very good domain name, the URL for the forum was easily found: http://forum.siebel.be.

It will probably begin as a forum for our company but we hope that it can grow to a international forum for Siebel developers. That’s why we chose to use English instead of Dutch what would have been logical since we are a Belgian company.

You can visit it here. If you like it, you can help by spreading the word and placing a link on your website/blog and promote it to your co-workers. Thanks in advance.

I know, I’ve been neglecting this blog for a long time, but I’m back now. From now on I’m going to try to post a new topic every two days or maybe every day.

Don’t expect them to be of extreme high quality, but after a while the quality will improve considerately. I think I just need the reflex to think in English while I’m writing. Since my mother tongue is Dutch, I’m not used to write blog entries in English. I had some very nice entries in my mind but translating them to English (without spelling mistakes) was the problem.

But from now on, I will do my best to update this blog as much as possible.

To be continued…

The reason that it has been so quiet here lately is that I had surgery last Monday and I’m home until next week. So that means no updates on this blog for two to tree weeks.

The surgery itself was nothing serious. Only a little knee surgery. Everything is going fine and I’m hoping to go back to work very soon.

For some applets in our application it was implemented that only a user with a certain position could create new records. To do this, I used scripting to enable/disable the invoke of the method if the user had the correct position. Since this was done with the position name hardcoded in the script, this was not the best method because the position name could change or an extra position could be added which also needed this function.

Therefor we wanted to search for position type, but there is no method in Siebel eScript to return the position type. Then a colleague remebered that there is a way to create new profile attributes which contains user info (such as the postion type we needed). After searching on Supportweb we found out that it was very easy to do this.

To create a new profile attribute, to the following:

Browse for the business component Personalization Profile and create a new field called “Position Type” (or copy the field Position) with following values:

• Mulitvalue Link: Position
• Dest Field: Position Type

After compiling the Business Component, you can get this profile attribute in a script with TheApplication().GetProfileAttr(”Position Type”)

We received the requirement to disable the Print Preview functionality in the entire application.

After searching a while, my colleague asked for help because he didn’t found anything on Supportweb about this and all his tries to disable it failed. Inactivating the Menu Item ‘File - Print Preview’ didn’t result in greying out the option from the menu. Even after deleting the cache of Internet Explorer, we could still do a Print Preview.

Searching Supportweb with the query “disable print preview” didn’t help us at all. Not a single SR was created with this problem. In the end I searched for “print preview” and finally I stumbled upon a piece of code that works. The code is actually very simple and is used on the PrintListService Business Service.

If you want to disable the Print Preview, use the following code in Server Script (eScript)

function Service_PreCanInvokeMethod (MethodName, &CanInvoke)
{
if(MethodName == “QuickPrintPreviewCustomAppletMenu”){
return(CancelOperation);
}
return (ContinueOperation);
}

This will disable the functionality in the entire application. It does not remove the menu item from the menu but just disables it (it becomes greyed out).

Everybody who works with Siebel and therefor uses Supportweb will probably know about this trick but I mention it anyway (for those who should not know it yet).

When you want to search Supportweb for something you must need a login. If you just want to search, you can use a read-only login. If you want to create a SR, you need read/write access.

But with a little workaround, you can use Supportweb for searching without having a login. How? It’s very easy. Just go to the homepage of Supportweb (which will redirect you to https://ebusiness.Siebel.com/Supportweb/index.asp) and at the loginscreen just press the “Login” button without filling in the fields.

As expected nothing happens and you stay on the login page. Now, type in the address bar http://Supportweb.Siebel.com and you will be able to login and search.

I don’t know if Siebel/Oracle is aware of this ‘bug’ or not but it seems logical that they do, since so many people know about it. And if the didn’t know it, they might know it now. Although I doubt that someone from Oracle reads this blog.

Today, the most unbelievable thing happened. We are in a very critical stage of the project since we are trying to make a release without issues in order to go live next week. Therefor we are working very long days.

Today around 5 o’clock I wanted to checkout a project from the server when I received an error that the connection with the Oracle database could not be established. I thought I was maybe related to the fact that my tools had been open for several days so I exited from tools and restarted it. But the same error occurred.

Then I tried to connect via Toad to the dev database and got the same error. When asking my colleague about it, he told me he got the same problem. After complaining to somebody internal, she called to the DBA who told her that several UNIX machines were being patched and that he was only informed about this 5 minutes before. He had no idea how long this would take.

So we spent there 3 more hours working on projects that were already checked out and did some investigation for the development work for tomorrow. When I left the building at 8h30, the database was still down. I sincerely hope that everything will be up and running because otherwise we will have a very big problem.

Yesterday I was telling that is was a slow day with nothing much to do and that I did not like it. Well, today was the complete oposite. It started as a slow day, but then completely changed.

The day started with retesting all bugs reported by our team, because the testers did not know how to test those bugs. Nothing too difficult so I seemed that it would be a slow day.

But during a meeting some other issues came up and we had to go through the list to see if we could reproduce them and assign a priorty to them. We also had some performance issues which required some time to look at.

Around 17h30 we got a call that all issues that could be resolved should be in the new release before going live. So after al, it ended up being a very long day. But I’m not complaining. The reason that I quited my previous job was that I had nothing to do - I was giving support on a Siebel application. So for me, working from 7 in the morning untill 8 at night it not a problem at all. I’m happy to do it.