Error Messages in SI Mode

Time again to stimulate your grey cells. Architectural differences between SI and HI clients are well documented. Recently working with SI application we observed a strange thing. SI client handles processing of error/Validation messages from BC layer and UI layer in different ways.

While invoking RaiseErrorText from BC error message was displayed on the top view bar but while invoking the same from applet was taking to different error web page resulting in context loss. User has to click Back button to go to previous page.

Same holds true for DVM messages. While invoking from BC layer using run time events the error message is displayed on the same view but while invoking from UI layer error message is displayed in different error web page. I am not able to break this thing why it behaves differently on different layers. Any insight/thought on this would be of some help.

Happy Debugging!!

SecUsernameFieldSubstitution - User Property

Issues are inevitable as sugar and cholesterol.

In my recent heist in configuring recipient groups i was dumbstruck with some untold user property. We wanted to add Person as recipient group for Service Request. As per siebel support we added desired values in the "COMM_RECIP_SRC" LOV table. Email started to flowing using this recepient group. But the interesting part is "Person" BC is not defined with the Recipient* user properties instead of that only one user property is defined as

Name - SecUsernameFieldSubstitution: EMail Addr

Value - Email Address

Unknown of its usage thought of throwing this to siebel forum. A little insight on this user property will be of great help.

Happy Cracking!!

"Siebel-Authored" flag in Data Map

Lot of things in siebel are still not documented. Talk about those magical user properties or custom classes with super natural powers, most of them needs to be discovered by trial only. Recently while working on the Siebel ASI, my eyes started gleaming when i saw "Siebel-Authored" flag in Data Map editor screen. My initial hollow guess was this flag might be used by siebel to identify predefault data mappers which are used by ASI. But after checking in sample i confronted that this flag was blank for all records.

Out of curiosity i started searching for usage of this flag but was not able to hunt down much. Please feel free to add comment in case you have any clue about this flag.

Happy Cracking!!

Character Counter in Siebel

One of the admirable features of Siebel is its GUI, which allows us to accomodate all the frills and fancies of user. Recently i was asked by one of my colleague to implement i-want-this type of functionality which involved character counter for TextArea field, which should display count of remaining characters which could be filled, in standard siebel eService application. After hours of hit and trial, i came up with one dirty solution.

Lets consider we need to have character counter in place for Description(Maximum 250 characters) in form applet. A basic solution is to have a control below the Description which will display the count of characters left. The document Id for Description is 's_1_1_11_1' and Counter is 's_1_2_45_1'. We can obtain the document ids by richt click on the page. Now comes the key part where we need to add logic to count the characters in Description and populate the counter. This could be accomplished by HTML Attributes property of Description control with below code:

onKeyDown="function fn(){ document.getElementById('s_1_2_45_1').value = 250 - document.getElementById('s_1_1_11_1').value.length; }setTimeout(fn,100);"

The main thing here is on every keydown we are calling a function which will set/reset the counter. Get the length of Description and populating the counter with 250 - length. The issue with this approach is that counter can't be read only. If we make Counter field read only we will not be able to access it in function. Request all siebel champions here to use their fire fighting skills and suggest any other solution.

Happy Counting!!