Siebel Technology

“Ha” you thought to yourself when you saw the title. What is this up to now? The premise is simple, really. Typical developer thought process: “calculated fields are read-only”. Reality: “you can edit calculated fields under special circumstances”.

You can send emails from Siebel application in more than one way - Hit F9 on any record. Provided the record type is enabled for email sending, F9 will open up a popup applet where you can select the email recipient, template, make changes to final email and finally send the email.

There are several ways to make a field read-only. In fact I had written about the glorious ways to make a field read-only in Siebel . While you can apply any method you like as long as they work (and, they do work), developers often forget the fact that “a back door is needed in more ways than one”.

When you use F9 option to send emails in Siebel, you can see an activity getting created automatically. This is true for multiple objects and is quite handy. For e.g. F9 in Contact creates an activity against Contact, the same holds good for account as well.

Siebel enables data to be exported to CSV/any character delimited files with a couple of clicks. All you need to do is to select the menu option on the applet, and hit “Export” on a list applet.

Multivalue links and links are one of the basic configuration items in Siebel alongside joins . Although they form one of the foundational blocks for Siebel data model, it surprises me how misunderstood they are.

You will see a property called “Long List” against picklists. Although it is often flagged as TRUE for dynamic picklists, there are seldom used against static LOVs. Siebel recommends that any picklist having more than 500 values must have the Long List property set to TRUE.

There are two ways to do things - the easy way, and the hard way. Though you would expect all developers to follow the easy way, that is always not the case.

Siebel provides two cursor modes that can be employed for different purposes - unidirectional and bidirectional queries. The mode does not denote how Siebel queries for the record, but more on how the application traverses through the result set.

Requirements for calculating difference between two dates, getting a target date by adding number of days/hours, or working day calculations are quite common. Julian functions rescue us in most of those scenarios.