Let me present the answer to question Why jQuery with help of few examples:

Example 1:

You have a Siebel SI implementation and you allow users to create service requests from your application. User hits create button after entering all the required information. It takes around 4-5 seconds for transaction to complete and user taken to the confirmation screen.

Question: What happens if user hits “Create” button again during that time period?

Answer: User will get error instead of confirmation screen

“An error has occurred finding your prior place in the system. Please try a new query.(SBL-DAT-00252)”

Solution: You can disable the button using javascript after one click

Problem: There are several problems with traditional solution such as:

• You have to do this for every button that results into transaction throughout application
• What if some server side validation fails you need to enable it.
• User has no idea why the button was disabled or what is happening during that time period

jQuery Solution: Present a Web 2.0 style “Please Wait” dialog while transaction is being processed, in addition to blocking the complete screen so that user cannot click anywhere else and cause more trouble.

Example 2: You would like the useful text (tooltips) to be presented to user when they hover over particular fields, controls etc.

Solution: Add title attribute for the controls to achieve something like

jQuery Solution: Convert these titles into Web 2.0 style tooltips with cool fade in and fade out effects

Example 3: Your server session times out after 15 minutes of inactivity. You want user warn user about the timeout and provide them with a choice to continue the session.

Solution: I don’t know solution to this problem using traditional approach but I am pretty sure it will be complex and difficult to manage.

jQuery Solution: Provide jQuery UI based dialog with a countdown timer with minimal scripting.

There are numerous other things that you can achieve with minimal  JavaScript housed in a centralized location providing you a clean and efficient SRF independent solution.I hope this opens up your mind to endless possibilities that you can achieve by using jQuery and jQuery based plugins to pimp up your Siebel SI application with some cool features.

In next post I will provide the steps and details on how to include jQuery in your application.

In this post I will share small piece of code that I wrote long time back to  resolve a production issue. This can be considered as a small utility of sorts that can come in handy when required or can be viewed as an example eScript code to read information from file and perform certain action.

Requirement:

You can have certain files in folder that you would like to attach to a different service requests.  Service Request Number or Id (unique identifier) is part of file name. You files have following naming convention “Text – Number – Text.extension” for example

Customerattach – 1234567890 – email.msg

Customerattach – 1234567891 – picturefile.jpg

Customerattach – 1234567892 – document.doc

Solution:

The function expects 3 inputs

1. FilePath: The path of file containing file details (Name of the files)
2. AttachPath: The path where the actual files (attachments) are located
3. RecordLimit: If you would like to limit

function AttachFile(Inputs, Outputs) 
{ 
  var filePath = Inputs.GetProperty("FilePath");  // The path where the text file containing file detais 
  var attachPath = Inputs.GetProperty("AttachPath"); //path to the attachments 
  var recLimit = Inputs.GetProperty("RecordLimit"); //number of records to process 
  var loopCount = 0,i=0; 
  var str = "", srId = "",status = "",fPath="",srNumber = ""; 
  var oFile = ""; 

  try 
  { 

   oFile = Clib.fopen(filePath,"r"); //open the file for reading 
    if(oFile != null) 
      { 
        //assign a default count if no limit is provided else use the limit 
        if(recLimit == "")  loopCount = 10000;   else  loopCount = recLimit;      

        var srBO:BusObject = TheApplication().GetBusObject("Service Request"); 
        var srBC:BusComp = srBO.GetBusComp("Service Request"); 
        var srAttachBC:BusComp = srBO.GetBusComp("Service Request Attachment"); 
        var result:PropertySet = TheApplication().NewPropertySet(); 

        while(1) 
        { 
        str = Clib.fgets(4000,oFile); 
        // if we have reched the limit or end of file then break the loop 
        if(str == null || i >= loopCount)  break; 

        srId = str.replace(/\D/g,""); //replace the text and just extract the srId 
        str = str.replace(/\n/g,"");  //remove the newline character from the file name 

         with(srBC) 
            { 
              ClearToQuery(); 
              SetViewMode(AllView); 
              SetSearchSpec("Service Request Reference",srId); //query with the extracted SR 
              ExecuteQuery(ForwardOnly); 
              if(FirstRecord()) //if SR record found then 
              { 
                  srNumber = GetFieldValue("SR Number"); 
                  srAttachBC.NewRecord(NewAfter); //create a new attachment record 
                  srAttachBC.SetFieldValue("Service Request Id",GetFieldValue("Id"));  // set the parent id 
                  fPath = attachPath + str; //concatinate the filepath and filename 
                  srAttachBC.SetFieldValue("Attachment Type","eMail/Fax Attachment"); 
                   //use class based CreateFile method to attach the actual file 
                  status = srAttachBC.InvokeMethod("CreateFile",fPath, "ActivityFileName","Y"); 
                  try 
                  { 
                    if(status == "Success") 
                      srAttachBC.WriteRecord(); 
                  } 
                  catch(e) //if error then 
                  { 
                    status = "Skipped"; 
                    srAttachBC.UndoRecord(); //do the cleanup 
                  }    

                  // Add the processed record information to output 
                  result.SetType("Result�); 
                  result.SetProperty("SR Number",srNumber) 
                  result.SetProperty("File Attached Name",str); 
                  result.SetProperty("SR Id",srId); 
                  result.SetProperty("Result",status); 
                  Outputs.AddChild(result.Copy()); 
                  result.Reset();     
              }// end of if 
              else //if no SR record found then report the faliure 
              { 
                  result.SetProperty("File Attached Name",str); 
                  result.SetProperty("SR Id",srId); 
                  result.SetProperty("Result","Not Found"); 
                  Outputs.AddChild(result.Copy()); 
                  result.Reset();                   
              } 
            } 
          i++; 
        } 
        Clib.fclose(oFile); 
      } 
  }// end of try 
  catch(e) 
  { 
   throw e; 
  } 
  finally 
  { 
    oFile = null; 
    srAttachBC = null; 
    srBC = null; 
    srBO = null; 
  } 
}

Siebel Standard interactivity is turning out to be worse than I had imagined. We are stumbling across various road blocks at every step. The effort that it takes to achieve just a small amount of customization is far more than expected. I can go on and on ranting about the issues of Standard Interactivity but that will be just waste of your and my time. I just intend to provide details around some important defect that can possibly become show stoppers while trying to implement Siebel Standard Interactivity Application.

Siebel SI application has issues with HTML Document Type. Before actually describing the issue I will answer some important questions that might come to you mind about DOCTYPE

What is HTML Document Type (DOCTYPE)?
DOCTYPE is short for Document Type.  The HTML DOCTYPE declaration tells the browser which version of HTML that a Web page uses.  Because there are multiple versions of HTML, browsers use the DOCTYPE declaration to determine how to render the page. Below is example of strict HTML 4.01 doctype

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>

More details on various DOCTYPE available can be found here

What is the purpose of HTML Document Type?
Using a DOCTYPE ensures that the web pages will render the same in each browser like Mozilla Firefox and IE 7 etc.

You might think that using DOCTYPE is must and good practice for Web Application, as it provide a standard experience across browsers.
But guess what, including DOCTYPE in a Siebel SI application messes up the UI. This has been identified as product defect and more details about this defect can be found here and Oracle recommends not to use DOCTYPE in Siebel SI and HI applications web templates.

You might be wondering that if adding DOCTYPE causes issues, then simple solution is not to include it but the truth is that world is not that simple. When you are working with Siebel SI then you inevitably will include external HTML content depending on your needs (In my case it was standard Header and Footer of the organization we were implementing the application for) and usually these instructions are included to adhere to standards. This is usually a good thing if you are not using Siebel but when it comes to Siebel SI it lands you in a Catch 22 situation.

If you use instruction then your Siebel UI will change (read as … messed up) and if you don’t then your external content might not work properly.

Surprisingly adding DOCTYPE causes issues only on Internet Explorer (All versions), other browsers such as Firefox, Chrome and Safari work without any issues.

Possible Solution:

Possible solution to this problem is to use DOCTYPE and then edit your CSS file to make it compliant to standards so that works properly in IE and all other browsers. For example, in the .minibuttonOn and .minibuttonOff clasess, add “px” to the padding and border-width declarations. Also added margin declaration like below:

Original CSS:

{padding:0 5 0 5; margin: 0 5 0 0; color:#000000; border-width:1px;border-style:solid; border-color:#666666; background-color:#DEDEDE; text-decoration:none; height:16;}

Modified CSS:
{padding:0px 5px 0px 5px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; color:#000000; border-width:1px;border-style:solid; border-color:#666666; background-color:#DEDEDE; text-decoration:none; height:16px;}

Hope this will help somebody hours of research or last minute changes.

This seems like a pretty simple and common requirement but the truth is, it is a common requirement but it is simple only if you know the solution.

Requirement:

You have a Start date and an End date. You need to find number of months between the two dates.

Assumption:

We do not exclude partial months or in other words we are not considering number of days in a month. Below are few examples to help in understanding what we are trying to achieve

Start Date : 01/01/2011 End Date : 03/15/2011   ::  Number of months = 3
Start Date : 01/28/2011 End Date : 02/01/2011   ::  Number of months = 2
Start Date : 01/01/2011 End Date : 01/15/2011   ::  Number of months = 1

Declarative Solution:

The Declarative solution is pretty simple and can be used anywhere Siebel supports expressions i.e Calculated Fields, Workflows, Runtime Events, Data Validation Manager, EAI Data Maps etc. I am providing solution by way of Calculated Field but the same expression can by used on any of the objects mentioned above

Calculated Field Expression :  JulianMonth([End Date]) - JulianMonth([Start Date]) + 1

Scripting Solution:

Sometimes scripting is the only available interface for you (business service supporting integration) and it is not possible to use declarative solution. In that case the function JulianMonth is not available to you. You can use following line of code to accomplish the same

var numOfMonth = (endDate.getYear() - startDate.getYear()) * 12 + endDate.getMonth() - startDate.getMonth() + 1 ;

I will post the solution to only consider whole months depending on the interest. Let me know by way of comments if you would like to see the solution to exclude partial months.

Your feedback is welcome as always.

The biggest feature of a SI application is that it works across browsers and not restricted to just IE. Unfortunately a SI application works only on IE Out of Box (OOB). You have to configure it to work for other browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Chrome. This configuration needs to be performed in Administration – Web Browser Screen.

A browser record needs to be added with minimum of following two capabilities in order for Siebel to work on it.

1. User Agent: Identifies the browser which is trying to access the application
2. Accept: What type of content request is allowed to be accepted from that browser.

User Agent:

You can identify your user agent from online tools such as http://whatsmyuseragent.com/. Just visit this website from the browser for which you want to find the user agent string. For example when opened with Chrome 16 this what is displayed

Accept: As shown below Accept is comma separated list of types of content that should be accepted from the browser. You can just copy paste the values already available browser list.

image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/x-shockwave-flash, */*

To make a SI application work in Firefox, Chrome and Safari you don’t need to add separate three browsers as all these browsers share same user agent. You can follow the steps given below to make it work for all three browsers

1. Go to Administration – Web Browser
2. Query for Mozilla 5.0 browser record and click on the hyperlink to drill down to capabilities view
3. Add below mentioned Capabilities to Mozilla 5.0 browser
1. User Agent : Mozilla/5.0
2. Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/msword, */*

Now you be able to login to your application from all types of browsers. You can add other capabilities as required some of the noteworthy capabilities are

1. FrameSupport. Indicates whether the browser can render frame tags (for example, <swe:frameset>).
2. CookiesAllowed. Indicates whether the browser supports cookies.
3. HighInteract. Indicates whether the browser is among those supported for Siebel’s High Interactivity Web applications (such as Internet Explorer 5.5).
4. ActiveX. Indicates whether the browser can support ActiveX controls.
5. JumpTab : Required for IE to support going back to previous page by clicking on back button just once.

Note: You will need to restart your Siebel Server for changes to take effect.

Questions and Feedback are welcomed as always.