GeeKs Blogging @ dotCOM

Siebel – Symbolic Strings – Usage

Symbolic Strings appear directly in Siebel Tools’ Object Explorer, an independent object. It has a child object of Symbolic String Locale, where you may define the individual translations for all the different languages in use in your project.

In case it is not visible directly, navigate to View -> Options -> Object Explorer tab, and enable the Symbolic Strings object if not already visible.

Now, you are ready to go!
Navigate to Symbolic Strings. You would note that most of the Symbolic Strings would appear with the prefix ‘SBL_’.

Do a NewRecord. Notice that the string ‘X_’ appears by default for the custom string. Don’t try to change it, even if you do, you would not be able to save it!
Edit the value, to something say, “X_DUMMY_STRING”. Fill out all the other relevant columns. It is generally preferred to keep all the custom Symbolic Strings in a separate project to enable easy check-in and check-out. Save the record.

Navigate to the Symbolic String Locale child object, in the Object Explorer. Do a new record, and enter values as per the requirement. Beware that the Language Name takes up the 3 character representation of the language, eg, ENU, SVE, etc.

Now for some under the hood details for the ones interested.
Symbolic Strings data is stored in the table, S_SYM_STR. Local data is stored in the table, S_SYM_STR_INTL. The various objects like the Applet Captions store Foreign Key references to the table S_SYM_STR to refer these Symbolic Strings.

The Symbolic Strings need to be compiled into the Siebel SRF. Be careful here as at times, developers have reported that mere compilation of the Symbolic Strings didn’t work in their case, and they had to compile the individual objects, like the applets too, into the Siebel SRF to make it work.

If a value is present in the String Override field of the particular control, it will take precedence over the Symbolic String referred. This is another point to be noted in their usage.

It is a generally recommended practice to always create a new project for the custom Symbolic Strings. For modifications, check-out and check-in the entire custom project, and not the individual objects. Strange behaviours have been reported if this is not followed. One typical problem is that you would only be able to work on the language of your local tools, multi language behaviour will be lost.

Related posts:

1. Siebel – Symbolic Strings – Change default ‘X_’ This is a smaill tip I was working on, which...
2. Siebel – Symbolic Strings Consider this a brief introductory tutorial on Symbolic Strings in...
3. Siebel – EAI Queue – Usage I had introduced the concept of Siebel EAI Queues in...
4. Siebel – Unable to check out objects I will discuss the following most prominent ways to enable...
5. Siebel – getMilliseconds() usage Siebel by default displays all dates in the system accurate...
6. Siebel EIM – Custom table mapping This article is similar to my previous article (Siebel EIM...
7. Siebel EIM – Custom column mapping It’s a very basic concept explaining how we can generate...