Scriptless Siebel solutions – Part1

This is a follow up article for a post I had written a few days ago about restricting record deletion. If you had followed the discussion/comments of the post you would have come to know that the solution offered by me (scripting) and suggested by others (MVL, Link, User property) were not perfect and there was still room for improvement.

After getting inspiration and an idea from Alex’s Scriptless Siebel post I decided to find a Scriptless solution for that requirement and after a bit of  hit and trial, I was able to find one (but not before facing quite problems ). Before we go ahead let’s have recap

Requirement:
We have Opportunities as Parent and Activities (Action BC) as child. Allow users to delete records from an Activities List Applet, only if more than 1 record is present.

Alex’s Idea: Idea that Alex shared was to

• Inovke a workflow
• Use Siebel Query  Operation 
• Get the record count
• Show error message using stop step if record count = 1.

Problem:

The biggest problem was that Alex had given the idea according to Siebel 8.0 and I was trying to implement it in Siebel 7.8 and guess what in Siebel 7.8 Query Operation doesn’t return a record count which meant that I could not use Query Operation and whole idea of using workflow was invalidated.

I opened an SR in Oracle Metalink to know if there is any way I can get a record count from a workflow, only to get a disappointing solution of using custom scripting within  workflow.

Solution:

But after some R&D I was able to get around this limitation and still achieve Scriptless Solution for the above requirement. The solution involves a workflow and a Runtime event.

There are two part to the solution

• Creating a Workflow
• Invoking the workflow

Let’s discuss them one by one.