Understanding SRF File

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If you have read last few posts of Siebel Unleashed then you must have read the post about Incremental compile and SRF File and if you have gone through the comments for that post then you must know that there is a debate going on about how SRF file internally stores object definition.

I was not satisfied by the explanation given by Vertex and also Siebel heavy weights (You know who I am talking about right??) had not expressed any thoughts on the topic  I decided to dig deeper into this matter by myself. (You guessed it right, I am talking about Alex and Jason)

After a lot of searching on web I came across a posting on ITToolbox which opened a new area for me to explore. After reading a post by Hui Ye, I came to know that SRF is actually not a binary file, it is an OLE Structured Storage File and it is possible to see what is inside that file using a Structured storage viewer. I wasted no time in downloading the viewer and see what inside the SRF file and here is what I found out.

I opened a vanilla SRF file that comes with call center module

and below what I saw

It listed all the entities that are suppose to be part of a SRF file and after expanding each entity I could see a lot of child entities

And each entity had some binary information associated it.

Count of each child entity was similar to the count in Siebel Tools. For example viewer showed me count as 27 for Application Object Entity

and when I verified in Siebel Tools the count was 28.

In tools we had created a new Application record hence this was not present in vanilla SRF file.

I then did an incremental compile test to see what exactly is happening.

Initial size of vanilla SRF file was 29 MB and Count for Business Component entity was 4368

I did an incremental compile of Account BC on this SRF and size of SRF increased to 31 MB But the Business Component entity count in view still was same at 4638.

After repeating this exercise and observing closely I noticed when I did an Incremental compile total object count of SRF file increased. Initially it was 39372 but after incremental compile it increased to 39374.

 It means two objects were added to SRF file but not to Business Component entity but somewhere else and still more tests revealed that a new object Last Incr. Compile

was being added and the end of SRF file but I was not able to find the other object.

 Each incremental compile of a new object increased the count by one. For example after compile Account business component and Action business component the count increased to 39375

but if you compiled the Account object again the count didn’t increase.  I am still trying to find out where these object definitions are being added and what else we can do with this information, will update once I find more.

Please do share if you find something more using information provided above.