GeeKs Blogging @ dotCOM

Siebel – Unable to check out objects

I will discuss the following most prominent ways to enable or disable object level check-outs in Siebel here:
1) EnableObjectCOCI parameter
2) Allow Object Locking

I will explain these terms here.

Siebel brings about lot of new features in every new release. One of the very useful improvements in Siebel 7.8 was “object level check-out” in Siebel Tools. For those who started working directly on Siebel 7.8 and above, uptill Siebel 7.7.x, Siebel had the concept of Projects. A project in Siebel was a logical grouping of various objects – Workflows, Business Services, BCs, Applets, etc. We had custom projects for EAI, Configuration, Pricing, B2B, etc. And, we could only check out or check in projects! This was really time consuming.

I remember waiting for days in some cases, for someone to check in the project, because I wanted to work on some other object that she was not working on, but was in the same Siebel project. With object level locking, an individual can work on individual objects (an Applet, BC, or Business Service, etc.), and some other member can simulaneously check-out some other object whether or not in the same project. This greatly increases productivity, speed, and quality.

However, I had a lot of friends coming upto me, that even though they had Siebel 7.8 or above installed, at times their object level check-out was not enabled for some objects. Either it was not enabled at all, or for some particular objects.

There are two parameters in Siebel which control the Object level check out in Siebel

1) EnableObjectCOCI parameter
This parameter is present in the ‘[Siebel]‘ section (generally present on top) of the tools.cfg file. Your tools.cfg file would be located in the folder, “/Tools/BIN/ENU”.
This parameter must be set to TRUE to enable the object level check out.

1) Allow Object Locking
This is a new column in Siebel Tools against Projects in Siebel Tools. For most projects, this flag is ticked TRUE by default. But, I have noticed that for Upgrade related projects, it is set to FALSE. In case you created custom project in Siebel Tools, this flag must be set to TRUE.

Though this has helped increase speed, it has still not solved the problem. I still have to wait for long period sometimes for my friends to check-in the commonly used objects like ‘Quote Item’ BC and the like. I am wondering about one thing now. What is the real use of having projects now? If I can check out objects, why do we still have projects? I can’t think of any place where we cannot do with objects, and projects are still required. After all, projects are only a logical grouping of some objects. Right?

Though checking out objects is trivial at times, and taken for granted, I have also had a few of my friends discussing about checking out Workflows in Siebel. I have also heard people claim that is one thing still not possible without checking out the entire project. I will try to cover this problem in future posts.

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