GeeKs Blogging @ dotCOM » workflows

Siebel – Fetch Active view properties – II

Nitin Jain — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:03:27 +0000

We discussed about fetching the values from the active view in my post yesterday.

However, I also felt that it was a very crude way of doing it. We can only get the information we need, by writing a small script for it. Moreover, the information was very limited.

I also came across an alternative method to get the details from the Active View. Try searching for the Business Service, “FINS Data Transfer Utilities” in your Siebel Tools. It has a method, “GetActiveViewProp”, which can help us achieve our objectives. Moreover, it supports our point of view of Scriptless Solutions!

Usage:
The BS, “FINS Data Transfer Utilities” does not take in any Input Arguments for the method, “GetActiveViewProp”. We can, thus, directly call this BS in Scripts or Workflows as the requirement may be.

There are a number of outputs, however, that return the corresponding data for the logged in user.
BusinessObject
This would return the Business Object of the view active at the time of invoking this Business Service.

IsAdminMode
This would determine if the current view works in Admin Mode. Admin Mode gives you extra priviledges on a particular view.
The Admin Mode is defined by the “Admin Mode Flag” on the property corresponding to the View in the Siebel Tools Object Explorer.

Screen
The name of the screen that the current view is a part of.

ThreadApplet
Name of the Thread Applet in the current focus.

View
The name of the active view.

ViewModeCode
This is returned in the form of a Code (a number). This defines the View Mode of the current view in focus.

I feel this post is getting too long. I’ll post a follow-up post with a practical example.

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Siebel – EAI Siebel Adapter – Looping Multiple Records

Nitin Jain — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:30:02 +0000

This is a follow-up post on the post, Siebel – Looping Multiple Records – III. We are looking at possibly more conventional methods to loop through multiple records in Siebel, than the SIA BC Utility Service.

We will make use of EAI Siebel Adapter’s QueryPage method to achieve the same. Knowledge of Siebel Workflow processes is essential to understanding this post.
The QueryPage method allows us to input an additional parameter, NumOutputObjects, to define the number of records that we want to output. Why not set this value to ’1′?

Following is an outline of the Dummy Workflow I used to achieve this.

Siebel EAI Adapter - Looping Multiple Records

Following are the Custom Process Properties and their default values at the time of starting the workflow.

Process Property Default Value

Last Record

New Query Y

Number of Output Objects

Order Type

SiebelMessage

Status

XMLHierarchy

The outline of the Individual Steps is as follows.
1) START – The starting step in the workflow

2) Query Records

Business Service Name EAI Siebel Adapter

Business Service Method QueryPage

Input Arguments:

OutputIntObjectName Literal 7.7 Order Entry Integration Object

PageSize Literal 1

Output Arguments:

OutputIntObjectName Output Argument SiebelMessage

Last Record Output Argument LastPage

Number of Output Objects Output Argument NumOutputObjects

New Query Literal N

3) Convert to XML Hier

Business Service Name EAI Integration Object to XML Hierarchy Converter

Business Service Method IntObjHierToXMLHier

Input Arguments:

SiebelMessage Process Property SiebelMessage

Output Arguments:

XMLHierarchy Output Argument XMLHierarchy

4) Extract Values

Business Service Name FINS Industry XML Query Service

Business Service Method Execute

Input Arguments:

Status Literal .//Status

XMLHierarchy Process Property XMLHierarchy

Output Arguments:

Status Output Argument Status

We have covered the FINS Industry XML Business Service in detail here on GeeksBlogging@dotCOM.

5) Process Record Data

Sub Process Dummy Processing Sub Process

Input Arguments:
As per requirement

Output Arguments:
As per requirement

6) Last Record?

Decision Point

Branch Conditions:

Process Property All Must Match(Ignore Case) Last Record FALSE

7) END – The Standard Siebel END Step

The Workflow ends successfully. We have successfully retrieved the data from each of the successive records one by one, and passed on the data for further processing to a Sub-process.

This post wouldn’t be complete without referring the source which gave me my first hints to implementing this. Thanks, Alex.

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Siebel – Looping Multiple Records – III

Nitin Jain — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:30:44 +0000

Looping through multiple records is a requirement we come across multiple times in almost all Siebel Implementations. And, I can’t recall how many times I have seen dirty scripts to achieve the objective.

I call this Part III, as we have already covered this before on GeeksBlogging@dotCOM, in the articles,
Siebel – Looping multiple records – Query and Process
Siebel – SIA BC Utility Service – Loop multiple records

The above two posts also achieve the same same objects, albeit in a different way.
In my list of preferences, I rate the solution, Siebel – SIA BC Utility Service – Loop multiple records the highest. The only problem is that the Business Service, “SIA BC Utility Service” is not all that well documented by Siebel / Oracle. Developers are often sceptical of using a component which does not have sufficient official documentation to support it.

As a solution to the above, I will introduce looping through multiple records using the coventional Siebel methods.
I am sure everybody who has ever worked in Siebel EAI, would have heard about the Siebel Vanilla Service, “EAI Siebel Adapter”. However, not all of us are aware of the true power of this BS. Yes, we will be using EAI Siebel Adapter BS to loop through multiple records in Siebel in the following posts!

EAI Siebel Adapter has many supported methods:
  Delete
  Execute
  Insert
  Query
  QueryPage
  Synchronize
  Update
  Upsert

The details of each of these methods and their usage calls for a separate post in itself. I strongly believe that and Siebel EAI professional should make himself very comfortable with this BS, as you would soon notice how much of Siebel EAI revolves around it.

Keep watching this space for the actual usage info. The above should be enough to get the grey cells going!

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Siebel – EAI Siebel Adapter Search Spec

Vikas Luthra — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:43:14 +0000

Hi,

I can bet that for anybody who has worked on Siebel EAI, ‘EAI Siebel Adapter’ is not an Alien term. This post is about EAI Siebel Adapter’s Query method.

How to restrict the number of Child records returned in Siebel adapter’s Query.

Scenario – Order and related Order Line Items

The way EAI Siebel Adapter’s Query method works is that, you specify the name of the IO in ‘OutputIntObjectName’ argument and row id of the parent record in ‘PrimaryRowId’ argument. However this way the query method will fetch all the Line Items for that Order.

So here, to restrict the number of Line Items returned (at the child Line Item level) in the EAI Siebel Adapter Query, we can use another input argument of Query method, which is ‘SearchSpec’.

The value for the ‘SearchSpec’ argument is an expression based on any field from the IC’s of the integration Object, with the dot notation. Not all of us would know that we can use it to restrict the number of child records returned.

Sample Expression: [Order Entry - Line Items.Source] = ‘Testing’

This expression means only the line itemitems where the field ‘Source’ of ‘Order Entry – Line Items’ BC has value ‘Testing’, will be retrieved in the output Siebel Message.

Just creating the expression for the ‘SearchSpec’ argument is a trick here.

In our requirement the user can select multiple line items, say out of 14 line items he has selected only 5 and clicks on ‘Sync Selected’ button. Now we have to create an expression based on selected line items and then pass it as a process property to the workflow where we are using the Siebel Adapter. The sample script for creating expression is pasted below:-

(Note: Here the variable SearchSp is an expression string which will be passed as an input to the workflow)

RecExists = this.BusComp().FirstSelected();
      while (RecExists)
        {
         rec[i] = this.BusComp().GetFieldValue(“Id”);
          RecExists = this.BusComp().NextSelected();
            i++;
           }
           SearchSp = “[Order Entry - Line Items.Id]=’” + selrec[0] + “‘”;

           for(x = 1; x < selrec.length; x++)
           {
            SearchSp = SearchSp + ” OR ” + “[Order Entry - Line Items.Id]=’” + selrec[x] + “‘”;

           }

That’s it! We hope this helps somebody someday.

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XPath Expressions in XML – Part I

Nitin Jain — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:28:21 +0000

This post has a broad focus, not just Siebel CRM. I have briefly alluded to the XML structures in EAI in some of my previous posts:
A meeting with Siebel EAI
FINS Industry XML Query Service

One of the interesting things that came out of the feedback was parsing the XML and the XPath expressions. This is exactly what I will be covering in my blog post today.

The XPath defines the path, or the way that you parse/read/traverse through an XML. The concept is generic in nature. However, Siebel in itself has some limitations in the way that it handles these expressions. I will try to cover both these scenarios here. I will take the following small XML Snippet as an example for better understanding of the same. One of the best ways to understanding this is to refer this structure of the XML is a popular XML Editor like Internet Explorer, Oxygen Editor, Editplus, Altova XML Spy (I like this the best), or any other supported browser.


    burger
    10
    1000


    pepsi
    5


Following is the terminology that I will be using:
roottag:                                snackbar
childtag:                               fastfood
grandchildtag:                  name, price
attribute:                             id (this is the attribute of the grandchild element in the XML)

The line on the top () defines that the structure is of an XML, and helps the browser parse it. One of the best ways to validate a valid XML is to try and open it in a web browser like Internet Explorer. In case of any discrepancies, the document will throw an error and will not open in the Browser.

Following are some of the common XPath expressions:
/     forward slash – used to differentiate between parent and child tags one level deep
//    two forward slashes – indicate searches anywhere in the XML, typically more than one level deep
./    indicates the currect XML document passed an input.
.//   indicates the need to search multiple levels deep in the document
@     indicates the attribute to a particular tag
*     wildcard character to match any tag/element in the XML

Using the above table, if for eg. I need to retrieve the value in the name tag for burger object, I would build the expression as:
./snackbar/fastfood/name

Similarly, for getting the price of ‘pepsi’, I would write:
./snackbar/drink/price

‘Calories’ tag appears just once in the structure, so I can directly use double slashes to retrieve the value ’1000′:
.//calories

To retrieve the value of the attribute for the name ‘pepsi’, I could use:
./snackbar/drink/name/@id

Note: It has been noted that in case a particular tag does not have a value, instead of returning NULL, in some cases Siebel returns the whitespace character, ‘ ‘.

There is more to this. However, what I have covered above are the only ones I have seen working in Siebel successfully.
I have split this blog into parts because of the length. Part II of this article will follow.

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Siebel – FINS Industry XML Query Service

Nitin Jain — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:05:22 +0000

“Extracting values from a tag deep down in the Hierarchy.” How many times have you come across this problem, and how many times have you wished that Siebel has an OOB method to help you extract these values?

Well, here it is. The “FINS Industry XML Query Service” in Siebel does just that. I am covering this here because of lack of documentation on the same by Oracle, and the immense use that this can be put to. This BS can save you a lot of headache of writing custom scripts to parse the entire XML Hierarchy in Siebel eScript, which can be a real pain in the neck.

This blog post will target the detailed usage of the BS, “FINS Industry XML Query Service” in Siebel CRM. This BS can be used directly in a Siebel Workflow, since this is vanilla. No scripting is needed which is as per the recommendations of Siebel Best Practices.

To catch the implementation details of this BS, log into Siebel Tools, query for “FINS Industry XML Query Service” in the Business Services in Object Explorer.

Business Service: FINS Industry XML Query Service
Method: Execute
Input Arguments: XMLHierarchy
Output Arguments:

Please note that this BS takes only the XMLHierarchy type of Hierarchy input. So, in case you have some other hierarchy available in your implementation, you would need to convert it into XMLHierarchy. I can suggest one of the following in this case which mostly save the day:
EAI XML Converter
XML Hierarchy Converter
EAI Integration Object to XML Hierarchy Converter

There is already sufficient documentation for the above.

Now that you have the XML Hierarchy available, you can feed this into the service, “FINS Industry XML Query Service” as an input from a Worfklow Process Property, in the Input Argument, “XMLHierarchy”.

Create a new Input argument. Let’s call it “TestProperty”. Set the Input Type as “Literal”.
In the Value column, you need to pass the location of the tag in the entire hierarchy, from which you wish to extract the value. This location is specified in terms of the XML XPath notation, or the more commonly called Dot Notation. If the tag in question exists only once in the entire length of the XML, we can set the XPath as, “.//” which we used in our example. In case of repeating tags, use the notation, “.///“.
You can further create new Input Arguments as above, to extract multiple values from multiple tags at the same time.

Now that the inputs have been provided, we need to set the output arguments from this BS in the workflow.
Create a new Process Property by the name, “TestProperty”. (I have named this same as the Input Argument just for the ease of use. You can always select a different name).
Create a new “FINS Industry XML Query Service” BS Output Argument, and set the following values:
Property Name: TestProperty
Type: Output Argument
Output Argument: TestProperty (Please note that this value must be same as the name given to the Input Argument above.)

Now, you are ready to go. Simulate this workflow to see the Output arguments being extracted from the input XML Hierarchy in the Watch Window during simulation.

One of the limitations that I have come across for this BS is that it cannot fetch value from a tag in case of repeating instances of ICs in the same XML, typically a case of repeating instances of child objects with the same tag name.

Let’s have cleaner Siebel, better Siebel. Let’s aim for Scriptless Siebel.

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Siebel – EnableServiceArgTracing – Logging Messages

Nitin Jain — Tue, 26 May 2009 06:51:54 +0000

Hi,

We have already discussed at quite a length the logging methods, the most prominent of these being the usage of vanilla Siebel EAI Queues. You can read about the entire series through the following links:
A meeting with Siebel EAI
Siebel – EAI Queue
Siebel – EAI Queue – Usage
Siebel – EAI Queue – a Critique’

I recently came across another vanilla method (EnableServiceArgTracing) to log the messages. Using this, the various Siebel logs can be created, and the Input and the Output messages to some of the Business Services can be written in XML format to a file. These XML files would appear as Siebel Dump files with a “.dmp” extension. These can be read off any standard text reading tool like Notepad, Editplus, Notepad++, etc. This process works with EAI Siebel Adapter and EAI Dispatcher business services.

Usage
Read about the detailed Local logging in Siebel here.
Set the Siebel SIEBEL_LOG_EVENTS environment variable value to:
3 – Input property set as Output in case of Error will be received
4 – Both Input and Output property set would be received

Be ready to receive huge Log files in your Siebel Log directory, and exceptionally slow Siebel performance after enabling this. Logs are now being created for every step, so this is all the more logical.

Set the Server parameter, “EnableServiceArgTracing” to “TRUE”.
In case of dedicated, local, or sample based testing, edit the following sections in the .cfg and set the following:

[EAISubsys]
EnableServiceArgTracing = TRUE

Restart Siebel and you are ready to go.

Now, whenever a process is run, it would create logs. Also, in the same directory you would see .dmp, or the Siebel Dump files being created. These are XML files which would have the Input and Output property sets contained. You can open and view these in any text editor.

The names of the files created are in the format:
_input_args_.dmp OR,
_output_args_.dmp

The main advantage of this method is that it does not require any changes, or switches in the main process to get the debugigng information. So, it is as clean as can be. Also, we can do this easily on any environment, TEST or any other.

The main disadvantage I see with this approach is that it logs Inputs and Outputs of only the EAI Siebel Adapter and the EAI Dispatcher Business Services. More usually, the integration is done using many other services, wherein a proper logging and error handling architecture becomes mandatory. So, I cannot do away with the other fancy stuff I generally incorporate into my architecture for that reason I guess!

I wish Siebel provided an easy way except studying Logs, to know which all Business Services or Workflows were invoked, and what all inputs and outputs were provided, whenever a complex process was invoked. It would make my life so much easier..

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Siebel – SIA BC Utility Service – Invoke BC Method

Ankit Bhardwaj — Thu, 14 May 2009 04:39:35 +0000

I had discussed about the vanilla Business Service, “SIA BC Utility Service”, method “Next Record” in my previous post. Today, I will discuss the other method that this BS supports, “Invoke Method”.

This method provides the functionality of invoking a particular method of the specified Business Component i.e. a method of that particular BC for which this business service is used for can be called using this method. This method requires two input arguments for the same:

i) BusComp Name :- This argument requires the bus component name whose method needs to be invoked.
ii) Method Name :- This argument requires the name of the method that has to be invoked.

Once you specify these input values, the BS will work and will save a lot of scripting which may otherwise needed to be done.

Hope you have enjoyed my series on the BS, “SIA BC Utility Service”.

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Siebel – EAI Queue

Nitin Jain — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:26:31 +0000

Okay, what are you thinking about? Is it Middlewares in EAI with their queue managers and queues? No, those are not the ones I am talking about. Every EAI professional knows about those.

Siebel provides an Out of the Box Message Logging mechanism for Siebel EAI messages. This is done through a Siebel feature called ‘EAI Queue’ which I would be discussing in detail in this article.

I have tried to provide a basic idea about message interchange in EAI in my last post. You can read it by clicking here.

Let’s consider a typical EAI scenario wherein we are exchanging data between two different systems. Assume the format of message interchange to be XML.
Point to point contacts risk losing the data, or overheads in case the other system is down. Generally, the robust and stable Middlewares are used as a solution to this problem, one of them being the IBM MQ Series. However, sitting at Siebel end, we always need to have a Logging mechanism which will log all the inbound and outbound messages in Siebel. Generally, this always calls for a lot of overhead in every implementation if you go in for a custom approach. Custom tables, BCs, BOs, Applets, Access controls of these logs, Business Services to log and see, testing, defect fixing, etc. need to be created and maintained.

This is a perfect scenario for usage of EAI Queue feature. To view this in action, navigate to the screen Administration – Integration -> EAI Queue. Please note that you may need special licenses to have this feature enabled in your installation.

In this screen, you would see all Siebel queues listed in the top applet. Some of the vanilla queues you can see and test out on Sample DB installation are:

tRFC Outbound to SAP
tRFC Inbound from SAP
HA Upgrade Receiver Log Queue
S2S Outbound Sub-Process Log Queue
and many more..

In the bottom applet, you would see all the messages which have been placed corresponding to the record in the top applet. Every record stored here will have a new record corresponding to it. Following message details are stored:

Sequence #
Reference Id
Status
Queued Timestamp
Comments
Attachment Name
Message File Size

As you can see, this covers most of the functionality that you would ever come across to log messages. This is a complete OOB feature which would eliminate large scale customizations, and thus, would save large scale project time and resources to a great extent. If need be, we can always go in for some customizations to this to suit the corresponding project requirements.

We have discovered and viewed the details of Siebel’s own EAI Queues in this article. In my next post, I will cover the usage of this feature in Siebel as to how it can be incorporated in your Siebel architecture in your implementation.

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Process Property	Default Value
Last Record
New Query	Y
Number of Output Objects
Order Type
SiebelMessage
Status
XMLHierarchy

Business Service Name	EAI Siebel Adapter
Business Service Method	QueryPage

OutputIntObjectName	Literal	7.7 Order Entry Integration Object
PageSize	Literal	1

OutputIntObjectName	Output Argument	SiebelMessage
Last Record	Output Argument	LastPage
Number of Output Objects	Output Argument	NumOutputObjects
New Query	Literal	N

Business Service Name	EAI Integration Object to XML Hierarchy Converter
Business Service Method	IntObjHierToXMLHier

Business Service Name	FINS Industry XML Query Service
Business Service Method	Execute

Status	Literal	.//Status
XMLHierarchy	Process Property	XMLHierarchy