Read Only Views.

This simple feature added in Siebel 7.7 was much expected.

I have worked in many installations where they had to code in escript
or clone buscomps or applets to fake read only Siebel application
behaviour. Obviously in an application sold with pretext to reduce
maintenance, this is really unacceptable.
But many Siebel installations requires that the read only views so as
to give it to external or reporting customers.

Responsibility Buscomp
(S_APP_VIEW_RESP)
has the field READ_ONLY_FLG added to it.

This is exposed also in the Application
Administration/Responsibilities view. Its very easy to make a view
assignment to a particular responsibility to become read only.

Force Active and Link Spec usage

I worked at a Siebel implementation where we had to deal with a
massive problem caused by a stupid configuration. A very famous
consulting company was doing the project. Naturally they brought some
people who are otherwise good but clueless on some specific siebel
functionality.

During the initial prototyping, a developer put all fields in the
Order Entry and Order line items buscomps to Force Active and LinkSpec
= True. This was an effort to avoid a error from eConfigurator links
(where it pulls fields from a buscomp). He never removed these force
Actives.Project went on and at some point it went to system testing. While
tuning , we found out the massive SQLs which were generated .

We now know the problem . But fixing this will be most difficult. Many
other developers tested their functionality and GUI behaviour assuming
the already Force Active fields. In an Order Entry implementation ,
these buscomps are used heavily and there is no escape other than
basically go thru the whole project and testing each functionality one more time.
Needless to say it was never undertaken , we just made a patch by
removing force Active on some fields we are sure that no one is
using. Imagine that ..For the life of that system , those fields will
be a part of the SQL fired many times during the application session.

Siebel Reflection

Ever wonder how to apply reflection to Siebel. For example how to
check whether a particular field is there in the current SRF.There is
a bunch business components in Siebel which can do most of these. For
example "SRF Business Component" and "SRF Field" can easily tell you
what is in a particular business component.

This trick is very useful when you build VBCs on the fly. Thats to
make a particular sort or effect which can be done with normal siebel
configuration, one can build a VBC on the fly (where you construct
the propert set dynamically to represent each field in the VBC), you
can query the business component rather than hardcode each field.

ER Designer in Siebel 7.7

The ER designer tool is much expected addition to Siebel Tools.

 

I have been to many implementations where the Custom Data model (Changes made by customers to the base data model .. Meaning new links and Joins) are always lost or unavailable. The whole business objects layer make many people data model agnostic. But as far as I am concerned data model is so very important.

 

The Siebel ER designer is a tool and an object in Siebel tools. While manual work is needed to generate such relationships, the tool is smart enough to automate some stuff for you. It checks the links and joins and represent the 1:M and 1:1 relationship. Good thing is instead of using the Siebel View relationships etc and getting lost in an extensive data model , if some one can maintain the custom data model , it will be useful in manyways 

 

Name Server Backups

Its important that a backup of the gateway name server file is made before and frequently when changing anything in
the Siebel enterprise server configuration.

Many a time, a corrupted name server can happen for no reason and we can loose work.

For example, we created a new comp def in one enterprise. There is a 10% chance that the Siebns.dat file is corrupted
(because of no reason .. The file likes to get corrupted). But we wont know this till we bounce it next time.
If that happens , we need to recover siebns.dat from backup but that might mean all Siebel configuration done from that
point onwards to be lost.

We can follow a process where we can issue a command , before we do any server configuration changes.

Backup namesrvr  on a Siebel Server Command line or hit the backup enterprise button in Server Configuration/Enterprises

 Why is this so?

Most of the Siebel information is stored in the Database which adequately backed up and is supposedly recoverable.
But the Server configuration is stored in a little file stored in the Gateway server called siebns.dat . Experience tells me
that the way Siebel Updates/inserts to this file can be problematic and many times results in Corruption. The file is , while
editable it seems, not so. Siebel doesn't supports such a manual edit of this file. When this file is corrupted weird things can
happen and many times server configuration screens becomes inaccessible.