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Login Failed in Dedicated Web Client : MVF Issue

Himanshu Bajpai — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 21:18:49 +0000

Recently I have met with the Problem in form of defect. The Problem was related to Record Visibility in Activity.

There were activities created for SR as a result of Email Response and properly visible in Activity List Applet under SR. We have Pick Applet in SR Applet for fetching all Email related activities. But strangely same activities were not visible in the Pick Applet.

On investigation, we found that the Applet was based on a different BC i.e. Action Special.
Seeing Different BC It is understood there is a problem of Record Visibility.
And since BC Record visibility is controlled by BusComp View Mode, there were bound to be some issues.
We compared Action and Action Special BCs BusComp View Mode.

Following was the screenshot of BC -Action Special (click to enlarge)

Siebel BC Action-special screenshot

Following was the screenshot of BC-Action (click to enlarge)

Siebel BC-Action screenshot

Above Snapshot shows the difference clearly !!

As a Solution –
1) We made Action Special similar to Action BC and added Visibilty MVF as Organization and Visibility MVL as Organization.
2) Compiled SRF.
3) Login in dedicated Client.
Shock!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It was throwing error of Wrong User Id and Password while few minutes back it was working fine.
Login again- Shock again-error again.

3rd Time Login (3 is my lucky number ), but error again but this time my luck was better. So error changed to something different and is indicated below (click to enlarge) -

Siebel Error - BC MVF Configuration issue

Since Organization MVL was not present in Action Special, I was not able login into the dedicated client.
Actually I did the View Mode Change by Compare Object utility on Action and Action Special BC. This smartness and laziness created the whole issue because compare object put the MVL and MVF even though MVL/MVF was not present in BC.

If you change the Visibility MVL/MVF Manually then you would not allowed by Siebel to pick MVL/MVF that is not present in BC.

But it is really good for me. Since I have learnt a lesson and that is generic.

Conclusion-If the Reference of MVL or MVF is not present in BC then you would not able to login Siebel Dedicated Client and you can expect to get the below error.
—————————
User ID or password that you entered is incorrect.
Please check the spelling and try again.
—————————

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more articles !!

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Inside Oracle Fusion Apps : CRM perspective

Nitin Jain — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 12:50:41 +0000

Okay, now this is bigg news. We all know about the Oracle Fusion Applications coming up, and how it is almost dreaded to eat up our jobs, viz. jobs for the technologies as we know them today.

One of the major components of the to-be-released Oracle Applications stack is the Customer Relationship Management or the CRM part.

Oracle has been building this component with a strong support, and partnership with Cognizant, or so it appears. At the time of my writing this, there is a huge event that Oracle is organizing on 1st June, 2011, at 10 AM PDT where we are due to get the first insight into this new software.

As Oracle claims, you can get the *insider’s* point-of-view on Oracle Fusion Apps and the business drivers behind it. Oracle says, the Oracle Fusion CRM component will set a new standard for CRMs today in sales performance management, enterprise integration, sales force automate, planning and business flexibility. Just has me asking, are you telling me that your current offerings are not upto the mark with the competition ?

Rest is more of Cognizant brouhaha over how many implementations it has done, or the number of man-hours of Siebel CRM experience that CTS has. Big deal. My question, how many of the consultants who worked on the CRM implementations, are still with CTS ??
In our ever dynamic IT Industry where *qualified* CRM consultants are one of the hottest commodities around, churning and the manpower turnover ratios are pretty high for nearly all the outsourcing players.

Of course, US and Europe would rather keep it simple. Just hire as-needed on contracts !

On a serious note, I would say all of us should be attending this webinar, maybe because for many of us, our daily bread depends on Oracle corp, and it would be good to know what’s coming my way.

The proposed agenda and takeaways from the event are -

Developing your Oracle roadmap and strategies to protect existing investments

Maximize revenue potential and achieve better sales performance management

Gaining a single view of your customer and harness the technical complexities of disparate systems

Some of speakers lined up for the event include -
Folia Grace, the Vice President of applications marketing for Oracle ERP and BI applications
As we know, Oracle Fusion HCM component peek-a-boo has already been offered by Oracle before. Folia has been related very closely to HCM development. Grace is helping to define and drive the market strategy for Oracle Human Capital Management, Financial Management, Project Management, Corporate Performance Management and BI Applications.

Philip Philippides is a Director and Practice Leader in Cognizant’s Customer Solution Practice
e began his career in high technology sales with over 13 years of successful sales and sales leadership. For the past 11 years has been focused on Sales Force Effectiveness strategy and process as well as Sales Force Automation (SFA) technology enablement. He has led dozens of lifecycle SFA implementations, as well as numerous customer strategy, customer experience, and sales effectiveness engagements.

Timothy Blank is a Director and Western Region Practice Leader responsible for: all Oracle CRM related business development activities, on-shore client facing delivery activities (focusing on oversight and quality assurance), personnel development, and thought leadership. He is focused on exceeding the year over year regional growth and performance metrics attributed to the organization as a whole by maintaining delivery excellence on all solution delivery opportunities. Tim is based out of Seattle, Washington and has been working with Oracle solutions for over 15 years

That’s all folks. If you may be interested, you can register for the event through the link below -
Oracle Fusion Apps : CRM perspective Registration Link

For regular updates on Oracle Fusion Applications, join our Linkedin group here -
LINKEDIN : Oracle Fusion Stack – CRM, ERP, Middleware, SOA, AIA, Integration

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Siebel Admin Mode Flag – II – Issue Log

Madhvi Arora — Mon, 17 May 2010 04:19:54 +0000

In the last post I described about Admin Mode Flag. However, the Admin mode flag is not always the Best way to go forward. It also comes with lots of perils of its own.

We faced certain problems on setting Admin Mode Flag which are:
1) Product Configurator does not work properly in Admin Mode. It throws error on loading as “Cannot load active Business Component”. So we had to remove the option of customizing products in Admin View
2) Since BC User properties do not work in Admin Mode, if you have invoked any method using Named Method, it will not work. You will need to invoke method through some other way in Admin view.
3) When we navigate from a Admin View to non-admin view in the same screen (if both non admin and admin views under same screen), BC User properties will be ignored even in non-admin view as we have navigated from admin view. So, this effects the functionality implemented for Non Admin view.
4) Related to same point above, if you are navigating from Admin View to non-admin view in the same screen, visibility settings will be ignored and all records will be visible under Non Admin view.

Please share your comments if you have faced any other problems in Admin View. Looking forward to a healthy discussion around this.

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Siebel – Admin Mode Flag

Madhvi Arora — Sun, 02 May 2010 07:51:19 +0000

In my last project,we had a requirement of Admin Views, so the admin users if required can change the data from frontend and not going to backend and running update queries.

Admin Views are those views in which all the records are visible to the person who has access to this view irrespective of the position of the person.

Admin views can be created by setting “Admin Mode flag” on the view to “Y”.

Following affects take palce on setting the Admin Mode Flag:
1.Visibility rules are disabled.
2.The user properties in the BC are ignored.
This means that the user properties such as “Field Read Only Field”, “BC Read Only field” get disable for the view on which this flag is set to true.
3.If the view is in Admin mode, then the following restrictions for the business components used by the applets of the view are ignored: no insert, no merge, and no update. However, if these restrictions are set at the applet level rather than the business component level, or if a field has a Read Only value of TRUE, the Admin mode does not affect them.

Vanilla examles of Admin View are: Account Administration View and the Opportunity Administration view.

But due to disabling of these user properties, we faced some practical problems. I will discuss these in my next post. Stay tuned !

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EAI Siebel Adapter BS – Upsert Multiple Child Records

nanpats — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 03:45:53 +0000

EAI Siebel Adapter finds its usage in almost all integration scenarios and business process automation. However, at times we hit upon limitations on its usage as Business Requirements become complex.

There is a bug which you must have encountered while using EAI Siebel Adapter BS. I will explain the issue with an example and a solution to resolve the issue…

Let’s say you need to upsert an entity e.g., Assets in Siebel using EAI Siebel Adapter BS. The data structure is a parent -child hierarchy which consists of Assets (primary IC) and Account (child IC).

Let’s assume that Account is resolved by the Id field (Id field being part of the 1st user key and is available in the message). There is a possibility wherein a given account would be repeated in your message instance with different attributes. Consider the following structure:

1-ABCABC Industries
1-XYZXYZ Industries
1-ABCY

In the above example, Account with Id “1-ABC” is repeated twice in the message. If the application tries to upsert this dataset using EAI Siebel Adapter, both the Accounts will be added as Child on Asset. However the data contained in the last instance of Account would be lost. This information lost might be critical for business operations.

Resolution:

In this case, you would be required to consolidate all the similar Account records into a single component before running an Upsert. The resulting message after consolidation would look something similar below:

1-ABCABC IndustriesY
1-XYZXYZ Industries

Hope you enjoyed the example above. Here, I’ll discuss some more of the limitations of EAI Siebel Adapter, and how we resolved them from practical experiences in life.

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Siebel – Upgrade Process – Part II

Nitin Jain — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:50:59 +0000

This is a continuation from the post, Siebel – Upgrade Process – Part I.

Step 5: Merge Repositories
Use Siebel Tools. In my Siebel Tools, the path is Tools -> Upgrade -> Upgrade Application…
You may need to Prepare a Repository before this.
Follow the suggested steps to merge the Current Repository to the Repository in the new release.

Step 6: Run Post-Merge Utilities
You would be able to leverage the Postmerge Utilities to Upgrade Form Applets, and to verify that Applets and Views are configured correctly, available directly in Siebel Tools. These analyze any Customizations in the existing Installation and apply changes as needed. These would now conform to the new UI in the new Siebel Application.

Step 7: Upgrade Custom Database Schema (upgphys)
Run the DB Configuration Utility in “upgphys” mode this time. It’ll further upgrade the Siebel Database with changes resulting from Repositories Merge. Basically, this takes care of the Customizations and completes the Database Upgrade.

Step 8: Perform the Post-Upgrade Tasks
Install the new Siebel Tools on the Developer Workstations and Extract Developer Databases of the Upgraded Application. Don’t forget to run Database Statistics.
Set up User Access and Visibility of Screens and Views.
Migrate Data and prepare for Testing.

Finally, Test, test and Test !!

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Siebel – Upgrade Process – Part I

Nitin Jain — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 04:48:14 +0000

If you have reached here, I assume you have already been through the Siebel Upgrade Assessment, and Planning steps.
Siebel – Why Upgrade? – Part I
Siebel – Why Upgrade? – Part II
Siebel – Upgrade Roadmap – Part I
Siebel – Upgrade Roadmap – Part II

Next step is to run the Upgrade.

Step 1: Upgrade you IT Infrastructure
Your IT Support Partner suggests upgrading to the latest version owing to the plethora of new functionality supported by it. Question: Have you discussed the expected increase on loading of your existing IT Infrastructure correspondingly?

Check out the minimum System Requirements Suggested by Oracle for the new Siebel Version that you are upgrading to. Don’t be afraid to factor in something extra. They are only the MINIMUM set of requirements, not the ideal ones!

After upgrading the Hardware, Upgrade the Siebel Enterprise Server to the new release. In the process, it also generates some files relevant in future steps of the Upgrade.

Step 2: Perform Pre-Upgrade Tasks
Prepare the Siebel Database for upgrade. Includes closing all Database Connections, Clearing pending Workflow Tasks, Disabling Custom Triggers, among others.

Step 3: Prepare Application Data
Prepare some Test Data for Migration. It is always smart to use only a small subset covering all major functionalities rather than the humongous Database that most organizations house today. You would obviously need to run the various tasks many a times over during the Upgrade, trying hit and trial in many of the cases. Time is precious. Save it!

Step 4: Siebel Database Upgrade (Upgrep)
Database Configuration Utility is one of the Best friends a Siebel Admin can have. Run it in the “Upgrep” mode. This performs a basic Upgrade of the Siebel Database Schema. Also, it loads the repositories to prepare for Repository Merge.

Stay tuned for the next part in the series..

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Siebel – Upgrade Roadmap – Part II

Nitin Jain — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 03:20:34 +0000

This is a continuation of my previous post, Siebel – Upgrade Roadmap – Part I.

As a part of the planning phase, feel free to:
1) Analyze the Complexity of the Upgrade
2) Be a good estimator of the level of effort needed to upgrade. Don’t mind putting in a few extra days in the plan than to crib later.

3) This is the Best type to deactivate, or phase out obsolete requirements. Make the most of the opportunity. As a Manager, you can always pass it on as something that will improve System Performance by cutting out the crap!
4) Good time to incorporate a few new requirements as well, based on some of the new functionalities supported out of the box
5) Define Team Roles, and set responsibility.
6) Is the application heavily Interfaced with other Applications? Wish you Best of Luck!
7) Check out the links on the Oracle My Oracle Support Portal regarding all the Alerts, etc. beforehand.
Try googling, or getting in touch with Experienced Partners to collate all the proven tools which can help the Upgrade be faster, and more efficient.
9) Data Migration, a point in question.
10) Some of the functionalities may not work EXACTLY the same as they did in the previous version. Plan User Training sessions in advance. Factor in appropriate time and Resources.

Step 3: Upgrade!
Start with the Development Environment. Upgrade and experiment as much as you want.
Practice with the upgrade on the Test Environment.
Okay, so good so far. Let’s now run a flaw-less Upgrade on the Production Environment! Cheers!

Stay tuned for the following posts on the Upgrade Process…

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Siebel – Upgrade Roadmap – Part I

Nitin Jain — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:17:23 +0000

You may find my previous posts on “Why to Upgrade?” interesting. As a follow-up to it, here, I would present a typical Process of Siebel CRM Upgrade.

I’ll cover the steps, and the some of the factors you could possibly keep in mind, while planning and executing an Upgrade. This would be the next step after you have taken the decision, “Yes, I have to upgrade!”.

Step 1: Assess and Analyze existing Siebel Installation
If you have already gone through my previous post on, “Why to Upgrade?”, you are already past this step. In case you haven’t yet, feel free to reach out to it. Hey, you can access it for free here!

Ask yourself the following questions whenever you are pondering over a Software Upgrade:
1) Do I really need an upgrade?
2) What is it in my business that my current implementation is not able to solve?
3) What are the clear Business benefits that the new system brings to the table? Are they relevant to me?
4) If I must upgrade, is my existing IT Infrastructure upto the demands of the new version Installation?
5) How much time do I have before my IT Support for my current version runs out?

Step 2: Plan the Upgrade
An Upgrade is a project in itself. Though most of it is automated, yet, that is no reason to sit cushy assuming things are bight at the other end of the tunnel. As a matter of fact, from my personal point of view, there are more pitfalls in case of an Upgrade, than in the case of a full-fledged implementation. Watch out for my upcoming post, “Siebel – Upgrade or Implement, that is the question!”.

Planning an upgrade is thus, almost as important a consideration than actually carrying it out. Personally I am a big fan of planning and sorting things out, before even hitting the Development Desk, lest you don’t mind messing up things out of ignorance.

But, don’t go by my words. I know quite a big lot of guyz who hit the desk straight away, and produce much better results than what I do..!!

.. to be continued ..

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Siebel – SIS OM PMT Service

Madhvi Arora — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 07:26:37 +0000

There are lots of vanilla business services available in Siebel which can be used to configure any process and this helps in avoiding scripting.

One of these services I came across is “SIS OM PMT Service”.

People who have worked on Order Mangement module must be aware of this service.

This service is extensively used in Order Management Process. Both its methods as well as its user properties are utilized in Order Creation Process.

But this service can be used in other modules as well.

It has various methods which can be used are:

Get Profile Attribute

Invoke BC Method

Refresh Business Component

Set Profile Attribute

In this post, I will discuss method “Refresh Business Component” of this service.

As clear from its name, it is used to refresh the Business Component.

In most of scenarios if we update some field or insert new record, UI is not refreshed with that data. We explicitly need to fire blank query either in our script or on UI to refresh UI. Instead of doing this we can use this Method to do so.

The required input arguments to this service are:

Business Object Name—> The name of the BO in which this data needs to be refreshed

Business Component Name—>The name of the BC where refresh is required.

This can be used in both script as well as workflow.

I will discuss the example of workflow:

WF_01

This is a sample workflow which is used to update account status.

The detail description is as follows:

Query For Record: Siebel Operation Step with operation Query is used. Here row_id has been passed in Object Id.

Record Found: Decision Box is used to check the record which needs to be updated exists in system or not .Here check is made with the help of Process Property “Siebel Operation Object Id”. If record is present, then Siebel Operation Object Id will not be null.

Update Account Status : Siebel Operation Step with operation Update is used. Here row_id has been passed in Object Id.

Refresh Record: This step uses BS “SIS OM PMT Service” with method “Refresh Business Component”.

Since here I am updating Account Status in Account Screen, the values of input arguments are:

Input Argument Type Value

Business Object Name Literal Account

Business Component Name Literal Account

Try this it will work.

Please share your valuable comments.

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Siebel – Why Upgrade? – Part II

Nitin Jain — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:03:20 +0000

This is a continuation of the post, “Siebel – Why Upgrade? – Part I”.

Here are some more..

3) Talk about Performance and Efficiency. Though I agree that the new software generally runs with a higher efficiency with most of the old bugs closed, the higher performance almost always comes at a cost of higher Hardware Configuration as well.

The new softwares are, however, seen to be efficient to handle larger volumes of data, or to churn out decisions on the basis of the humongous data store. Maybe, the old system didn’t support it in the first place to make it possible, forget about efficiency!

4) With each higher version, I have personally noted that Siebel Data Model becomes more and more complex. This in turn means more and more universally agreed standards now form a part of the Siebel CRM Installation. This helps a Customer become more aware of the global standards that he may introduce in his organization, if not already there, or to align his Business Process accordingly.

Another fall-out of this, is higher Regulatory Compliance. Now, how many times have I heard Customers going in for implementation of packaged Applications owing to requirements to map to the local Regulatory Requirements?!

Ask yourself the following questions whenever you are pondering over a Software Upgrade:
1) Do I really need an upgrade?
2) What is it in my business that my current implementation is not able to solve?
3) What are the clear Business benefits that the new system brings to the table? Are they relevant to me?
4) If I must upgrade, is my existing IT Infrastructure upto the demands of the new version Installation?
5) How much time do I have before my IT Support for my current version runs out?

Plan ahead, to be ahead.

Feel free to add, or suggest. I am leaving the ground open. Cheers!

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Siebel – Why Upgrade? – Part I

Nitin Jain — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:13:39 +0000

Hi all,

I am back to Siebel Technical Stuff after a long time. I recently worked as a part of a Siebel Upgrade Project for one of my clients.

Siebel Upgrade is a version update methodology supported by Oracle. The Customer can easily upgrade from an older version of Siebel to a higher version.

There is generally a very wide range of reasons as to why people may decide to upgrade. These may range from the obvious, to the obscure, and to truly blasphemous to some CRM Consultants. But, I guess this is one very important aspect which keeps the IT Industry rolling!!

Well, amongst many others, following are some of the popular reasons for which Organizations may decide to upgrade their existing Siebel, or other IT Software Installations.

1) This particular customer of ours very serious about the system running as smoothly as possible. Following this methodology, he banks on a lot of support from Microsoft and Oracle to avoid any issues in Production going forward. The issue is, Microsoft is phasing out support for Windows Server 2003 soon. To make matters worse, Siebel 7.5 is not certified to run on MS Windows Server 2008, the next logical step.

Solution: Upgrade to nearest higher version of Siebel which is supported on the new MS OS. The one you are using is on fire right now.

2) Generally, there is a whole lot of new functionality that Oracle introduces with each new version of Siebel CRM. The customers may want to make use of some of these new functionalities. The Business Benefit may imply a case strong enough to justify the extra cost of moving up to the new version.

Who knows, a Customer may just be able to eliminate a buggy Custom Module altogether by making use of some new functionality provided OOB in a higher version!

Wait for the remaining part of the post. What do you think could be the other reasons?

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Siebel : Security Vulnerability !

Nitin Jain — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:17:46 +0000

This post could have far-reaching implications. I am still at crossroads whether I should be covering this or not..

The baseline is that there has been a Security Vulnerability detected, and announced. It is said to have been detected nearly a year ago, and informed to the Parent Organization. However, despite a year passing by, we are not aware of any remedial action having been taken by the Corporation. Since the vulnerability has already been publicly announced over the internet, we feel it’s safe to cover it here as well. We feel morally responsible to apprise Oracle Corp of the issue by building sufficient public opinion to patch it..

This Security Vulnerability has been detected in some of the older versions of Oracle’s very popular Siebel CRM Softwa=re, aka versions 7.7 and 7.8. It has not been tested on the older versions, but, expectedly it would appear there as well.

This Security Loophole has been detected by “Yaniv Miron”, a Security Researcher from Israel. Click here to reach his LinkedIn profile directly.

The vulnerability comes by the name of, “Oracle Siebel CRM ‘start.swe’ Cross Site Scripting Vulnerability”.

It is rated “Low Risk”, and is Remotely Exploitable.

The following is directly from VUPEN :
” ..This vulnerability could be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary scripting code. This issue is caused by an input validation error in the “htim_enu/start.swe” script when processing user-supplied data, which could be exploited by attackers to cause arbitrary scripting code to be executed by the user’s browser in the security context of an affected site.. “

SECUNIA says..
” ..Input passed via the URL to htim_enu/start.swe is not properly sanitised before being returned to the user. This can be exploited to execute arbitrary HTML and script code in a user’s browser session in context of an affected site.. “

A simple example could be:

http://example.com/htim_enu/start.swe/?>'">

Jan 2009 – Vulnerability found
Jan 2009 – Vendor Notification
Feb 2010 – Public Disclosure

Complete details about the vulnerability can be found at the following URLs where it was first reported:

http://www.vupen.com/english/advisories/2010/0516

http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2010/Mar/6

The original Advisories may be downloaded from the links below:
Siebel Loyalty Advisory
Siebel CRM Advisory

The vulnerability is already popular over Twitter.. try the link below..
Twitter Links for Siebel Advisory

Could there be better reasons to Upgrade to the latest Siebel versions, 8.x ?
Considering Siebel CRM is an expensive product targetted only at the companies with $250K+ revenues, this is all the more important.

Note: This post is for informational purposes only.
The author of this document is not and will not hold any responsibility for any illegal or unauthorized use of the information contained within this document, or that is implied from it.
The author of this document does not encourage in any way whatsoever, attacking any Siebel based System.

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My Oracle Support Non Flash Version

Nitin Jain — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:07:16 +0000

We all need Professional support one time or the other, no matter, what our role is in a Project Implementation.

Professional Support for Siebel from the vendor has gone from..
Siebel Supportweb (god, I loved it!) -> Oracle Metalink3 -> Oracle’s My Oracle Support

My Oracle Support has brought with itself a Pandora’s box of problems, more than the benefits that is offers. The Flash enabled version has a neat UI to look at, and somewhat better navigability. Well, the aesthetics is definitely better.

But, for quite a lot of reasons we may want not to use the Flash enabled version of My Oracle Support. They could range from unfamiliar Interface, to Performance, Flash is not available on my Work Computer!

Flash Enabled Version:

http://support.oracle.com

Non Flash Version:

http://supporthtml.oracle.com

Welcome back, Metalink!

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Siebel – Unable to login to mobile client

Madhvi Arora — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:08:58 +0000

After long time I am writing a blog…

This time related to Siebel Admin
Earlier I used to work with Siebel 7.8 and now 8.1..
So quite a different experience..

In Siebel 8.1, I had successfully initilized my dbf from tool and was able to login into Siebel Tools.
But suprisingly, using same dbf I was not able to login to my mobile client and it was throwing the error,
“user id /password not correct..”

I tried everything..from reinializing my dbf to changing parameters in my client cfg…
But all atempts were in vain..
Finally I looked in to Siebel logs and found the error as “Error connecting to datasource SSD Local Db default instance”

I tool the help from one of my seniors and he recommended the following way out.. I tried, and it worked..

Just followed below mentioned steps and problem got resolved and I was able to successfully login into local client…
1. Open the ODBC Administrator.
2. Select the System DSN tab.
3. Select the local Tools datasource (by default, “SSD Local Db default instance”).
4. Click the Configure button.
5. In the configuration window, select the Database tab.
6. Clear the field labelled “Server name”.
7. Close the configuration window and exit the ODBC Administrator.

I am really happy that the issue finally got resolved, and I would like to thank my mentor for helping me. Please add a comment if this helps you sometime.. I’ll be glad to know..

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CRUD

Nitin Jain — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:27:58 +0000

No, I am not referring to the Billiards game here. While browsing the Internet, I keep coming across a plethora of new technical terms everyday.

One such term I came across recently is ‘CRUD’. If you already know what it is, this post is not for you!!

For those who don’t, CRUD is a general terminology for Create, Read, Update and Delete.

These are some of the typical operations that one performs on a set of data in a Database or any other Persistent Storage.
Creation refers to creation of new records in the Database, typically the Database Insert Operation.
Read is the reading of the records from the Database. Typically the view operations.
Update would be the usual updation of some particular data in some existing records.
Delete would mean the data is no longer available in the Database. Better be careful here!!

Question: How is this relevant to Siebel or CRM which is the current theme on GeeksBlogging@dotCOM?

Answer: Lots!
We work with CRM systems all the time. Now, that means creation of huge chunks of data. If this is an indication, Siebel CRM system houses 4500 tables in its Database! Just imagine the kind of data that would be there in the system. I recall coming across the 50-100 GB Database sizes quite frequently.

With so much of data flowing around, all the operations on every record are equally important. A small goof-up could easily mess up thousands of records, just to start with, in a very small span of time.

[Update] I also came across an interesting differentiation from Graham. Let’s talk about VBCs and EBCs in Siebel. Following is the text from Graham himself:
“.. As long as the data is only being used to read then an EBC on a view will be a good solution, it has a “short” path to the database and so will give a good level of performance. However, updating or creating records through this route will not be supported by Oracle.

If a full CRUD solution is needed then you’ll be forced into the VBC route, as you then have the control (within script or any other technology you use to implement the background logic) in order to implemented your business rules and logic so that the database integrity is maintained.

This technical solution needs backed up by a careful functional analysis though. Why do the two BCs need combined? How will updates be handled? What are the relationships? Often exploring these sort of questions uncovers that a carefuyl structuring of the view and the applets within it are all that are really needed to solve the business requirement; remember that by creating an EBC or VBC to meet the requirement you are implying an ongoing maintenance cost for the life of the implementation, an operational cost that the business will not necessarily have considered when they wrote the requirement!
.. ”

Following alternative definitions for CRUD are available on Wikipedia:
ABCD: add, browse, change, delete
ACID: add, change, inquire, delete — though this can be confused with the transactional use of the acronym ACID.
BREAD: browse, read, edit, add, delete
VADE(R): view, add, delete, edit (and restore, for systems supporting transaction processing)
QDIM: query, delete, insert, modify
SAID: show, alter, insert, delete
VEDAS: view, edit, delete, add, search
SCUD: select, create, update, delete

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Query on the Long Column or Field

Nitin Jain — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:56:13 +0000

A typical problem in any EAI project. Others too!!

One of the most common ways of building custom Error Handling or Logging mechanisms include dumping huge messages and XMLs in the database for future reference. It works as an excellent logging mechanism which can be pulled out in case something in the system fails.

This is generally achieved by using the “Long” column of the Oracle Database, and/or concatening multiple String type of columns.

Now, the typical problem. We dump the XMLs, fair enough. However, we can only pull out specific information from this XML and populate on some other columns, but, definitely not ALL the data in the huge XML that we have. We may pull out the Order Id, Reference Number and a couple of more fields, yet we definitely cannot drill out all the information.

However, the XML contains a lot more data. How do we query on the data in the Long column, in case the information is hidden deep into the XML, and is not saved separately in a String type column? I am assuming the Table based Logging mechanism.

I ran across something similar recently when I realized that I could not query on the Long Database column. Now, I have not discovered a special way of querying on the Long column that I am going to share here. Rather, this is a workaround.

Query for the relevant data in a traditional PL/SQL Editor like the SQL Developer or TOAD. You can still not run a query on the Long data type of column, but, with sufficient filters, you can reach out to a limited RecordSet around the actual record.

Right click -> Export -> TXT / CSV format and open the newly created file in a file editor. Run our favourite “Find..” tool to query for the exact data that you are looking for. And, voila, it could help you get as close to the actual record as possible.

Yeah, I agree if some of you out there are shouting, “Dumb, dumb, dumb tip!!”. But then, worked for me.

I had this typical interface which was just dumping XMLs in the Logs one after the other, without any identifiers. And, it was becoming terribly difficult to dig out the XML with a particular identifier. After all else that I could think of failed, this one worked like a charm.

I thank all my friends who were with me till late night, helping me get this through! Thanks, Madhvi. Thanks, Himanshu. Cheers..

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Siebel – Installer hangs midway

Nitin Jain — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 02:47:21 +0000

In my website statistics, I see somebody trying to find a solution to the above problem. The Siebel Installer starts, when you start an installation. However, it doesn’t complete and it hangs somewhere in the midway. I write this just when I was having the exact same problem today (I hope that explains the smiley which opens this post!).

I am detailing below the solution I used. Hope it helps someday!

I came across this during making some specific installations on Siebel v8.1.1. I noticed that the installer ran upto 92% installed status, and then all of a sudden, just hung.

The good thing with most of these installers is that they generally indicate what stage they are on currently, and as to what exactly they are trying to do. In my case, it indicated that it was trying to register the DLL “ssceolpr.dll”, which seemed to be taking exceptionally long.

Here’s what I did:
I navigated to my Command Line. To do this, I pressed Start -> Run and typed “cmd” (hey, this is turning into “Siebel for Dummies” kind of thing!!)

type in the following on the Command Line:
regsvr32 /s d:\SiebClient\bin\ssceolpr.dll

The above command forcibly registers this DLL with the MS Windows OS

That’s it!
By doing this, I forcibly registered the DLL which was hanging when launching it over and over again. Please note that all this while the installer was still open, in the hung state. I did not kill it, or abort the installation on anything like that.

The installation just proceeded from there, and proceeded onto complete 100%.

The normal debugging in such a situation would probably be to check out the log files that are being created, scroll to the end of the Log file and verify that this is the exact step which is failing and take appropriate corrective action. Log files are the best things that us, the software developers, have done to software!

You could probably see something like, “spawning d:\SiebClient\bin\ssceolpr.dll..” or something similar in the log files if you get stuck at exactly the same place as I did.

That’s all for this post, folks!

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Siebel – Case Insensitivity (CIAI) Wizard

Nitin Jain — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 02:54:52 +0000

CIAI stands for Case Insensitive and Accent Insensitive in Siebel. This can be called the first post on GeeksBlogging@dotCOM on Siebel 8 New Features.

I had discussed about some traditional methods of controlling Case Sensitivity in Siebel queries. However, in version 8.0, Siebel has introduced a new feature of the CIAI Wizard which goes a step further in controlling this functionality. This has been carried forward in Siebel 8.1 albeit with some minor modifications.

This is about making searches on individual columns in a Siebel Database Case Independent. Following are the simple steps to configure it for a Siebel Technical Developer:
1) Navigate to Siebel Tools and select the correct Siebel Repository. This could be important in case you have multiple active Siebel Repositories in the System.
2) In Siebel Tools, Navigate to ‘Table’ and then ‘Column’ Object Type after expanding Table in the Object Explorer.
3) Select and highlight the columns on which you wish to run the CIAI Wizard (the ones you wish to make Case Insensitive).
4) Right-click and select ‘Case Insensitivity’ from the Pop Up menu. The CIAI Wizard starts at this time.
5) Review the Configuration Settings and the Export Listing Export Directory. Take this step seriously. It could be handy in Debug operations.
6) Complete the wizard using the ‘Next’ and ‘Finish’ buttons. The Wizard will configure the columns in the Siebel Repository to support CIAI Queries.

Siebel now reroutes the queries on the selected columns to the new columns created in Step (2) above.

Important: After this process is complete, you need to apply and activate the tables, and compile into the Siebel SRF for the changes to take effect.

Upgrade: It is important for the upgrade process to complete, in case you are upgrading to Siebel 8.x from previous versions, before running the CIAI Wizard.

Good News: It is possible to revert the changes done by the CIAI Wizard in case you feel you have messed up something.

In principle, the CIAI Wizard does the following changes in the Database:
1) Set the Default Sensitivity Property for the particular columns to “DB Case & Accent” in the Siebel Database.
2) For each eligible Base column, creates a new CIAI Column with the Base column value converted to UPPERCASE.
3) Deletes old indexes, and recreates them with the Case Insensitivity as defined, referring to the new CIAI columns defined in Step (2).
4) Sets flags and performs other configuration operations in the repository to support CIAI queries

Warning:
The changes once made by using the CIAI Wizard may be undone. However, there is a flaw in the documentation. The columns that were created on the Base Table by the CIAI Wizard need to be manually Inactivated before trying to revert the CIAI Changes.

The documentation says that the CIAI Wizard inactivates the column automatically. However, in practice that is not the case! Do add in case you have had any weird experience using the CIAI.

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Oracle VM Templates for Siebel CRM

Nitin Jain — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:05:22 +0000

In a normal case, to set up a Siebel CRM solution on a server, we would first need to separately set up the Server Operating System, Database Server and Siebel CRM. This could be quite a task and could take substantial time and resources. Why not follow the easy way out?

Oracle VM is Oracle’s Virtual Machine offering from Oracle. Virtual Machines in general allow us to set up a completely new Hardware like Software on top of our existing installations such that the new VM can be started or stopped right from within our existing Operating System without affecting any of our existing settings.

Siebel CRM is the leading CRM solution from Oracle. Oracle has recently announced new Oracle VM templates pre-installed with Siebel CRM. This means huge value addition to ISVs and clients alike where the users can just install the Oracle VM (with Siebel) on the existing architecture, and as Oracle claims, to be up and running in lesser than 3 hours!

Oracle VM templates for Siebel comprise completely of the Oracle stack. it contains:
1) Oracle Enterprise Linux – The famous connotation of Unbreakable Linux comes to my mind. Available as a Free Download from Oracle website.
2) Oracle VM – Available free of Cost.
3) Oracle Database Server
4) Oracle’s Siebel CRM

The complete set is downloaded in the form of two separate VM downloads:
1) Oracle Database VM
2) Oracle Siebel CRM VM

Highlights:
1) Full Oracle support – Since the entire stack has been provided by Oracle in this case, it could be a big pain reliever to many organizations.
2) Cost savings – These templates work on Oracle’s Enterprise Linux. The bundle is nicely priced to make a tempting offer.
3) Huge Energy and Space savings – This comes directly from it being a Virtual Machine based solution. Do we need say more?
4) Quick Start – Oracle VM solution will reduce the set up time for any Siebel Installation. We can almost bet that the time cannot be matched by the regular Siebel Installation.
5) I have always been a big fan of sourcing as many softwares from the same vendor, be it Oracle, or be it Microsoft, or SAP for that matter. Interoperability issues are largely avoided with this approach. I like that!
6) Can be integrated in an existing Siebel environment. New instances of Application Modules, Application Servers and Web Servers can be provisioned within minutes.
7) Go Green! Is that not the mantra nowadayz. Virtual machines are always a no-brainer in this regard.

One of the flaws that I noticed with the installations made available were that there was no support for 64-bit Enterprise Linux. Only 32-bit standard Linux was available in this case. I personally feel that should definitely be an option.

The real adoption and corresponding reviews, though, will take some time to come. Till then, let’s wait and watch to see how it shapes up!

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Input Argument	Type	Value
Business Object Name	Literal	Account
Business Component Name	Literal	Account