Edit Web Layout Error in Siebel Tools

Siebel tools has been there since forever.

Generally speaking, it has been one of the stable software I have used. It is mature over more than a decade to provide the required tools for Siebel developer. Although it had some stability issues in Windows 8.1 (for me), I have not found any serious issues so far.

But, as developers we do tend to experiment and check the extremities once in awhile.

One of the most common thinks the development team does is to share the configuration and setup parameters amongst the team members. Although this works really well and is a fairly common way of establishing standards across the team, it does lead to problems when Siebel installation is not similar on all computers.

One of the typical problems that we have observed is that “edit web layout” shows a “page cannot be displayed” error.

Just right click on view/applet, select “Edit Web Layout”.

Instead of displaying the web layout of the object, Siebel tools shows a beautiful “page cannot be displayed” error.

Don’t panic. Don’t run to Oracle. Perform these debugging steps instead.

1. Check whether everyone in the team is getting the same error. Can the problem be localised to specific computers?
2. Check whether “WebClientSiteDir” parameter in the CFG points to the correct Tools installation folder.
   For me it is -

WebClientSiteDir         = F:\dev\siebel\Tools\public\enu

    Check whether the user ID that you use has Read/Write access to the tools folder. This is the problem in almost 99% of the cases.</li>

      * Replace the OOB Tools CFG and check whether the problem goes away. If it indeed does, one of the ways to debug the root cause is to add your CFG changes one-by-one to the CFG file.
        They should take care of it another 0.9% of the problems.
      * For the 0.1% you always have the option of uninstalling Siebel, deleting all Siebel folders, and reinstalling Siebel to verify whether the problem went away</ol>

    Of course, if you're on the bleeding edge Siebel version, you would have to check back with Oracle 🙂