Reload Runtime Events Not Working

Siebel behaves weirdly. This is the statement that i think most of the people would agree to. And with experience, you will know a lot of things written in theory/bookshelf will not behave in the same way practically. Naming a few like activating a field, enabling a method etc. The list goes on and on and on.

Out of many one such instance i have faced recently, when i have created a runtime event and  the same was not reflecting, even when i have reloaded the RTE couple of times. 

Keep a note to beginners here that whenever you create or update a Runtime Event or its related Action Sets, you need to do Reload Runtime Events which is there in the Menu. This is required in the same way when you need to do a Clear Cache after creating or updating an LOV to get it reflected in the component.

Now as i said even after i have done the Reload RTE couple of times, when i was testing the RTE change was not reflecting. As part of the troubleshooting i have tried to launch a dedicated client, and to my surprise, RTE was getting reflected.

This discovery indicated that somehow the component is not taking the effect of newly created RTE. Now if you go with theory this should not be the case.

Resolution: Now i have witnessed this issue not once but twice. How to resolve it? Bounce the component and chances are more likely that issue will get resolve and RTE will be reflected in component.

For the benefit of the user, i have made a thumb rule, if something inexplicable happens in siebel, bounce the component if you could to avoid hours of frustration. Happy Learning !!!

OOTB BS for Clearing the LOV Cache

Many of us might be aware of this. But I thought it will be worth to share an undocumented OOTB Business Service for clearing the LOV Cache in Siebel.

So this could be helpful in automating the process of clearing the cache.

Details of this BS is as below:

BS: LOV Cache Clear Service

Methods: Activate

You can invoke this method and this does not require any input arguments which is logical as the function of this method is to clear LOV Cache.

This Business Service also have another method as 'RestoreActivate', use of which i am not aware of. Anyone who knows this are most welcome to enlighten us with the help of comment on this article.

Hope this little piece of information will be helpful. Keep Exploring !!!

Importance of HTML Template in Template

Recently I have been debugging an issue which is related to incorrect email which is being sent to the end user. Incorrect in the sense that the characters like ' is getting converted into ' in the message body.

This was happening when we are doing a query on BC which contain these templates and fetching the message body.

Now after hours of debugging, we have found out that in the Template Properties under Administration - Communications as can be seen in the screenshot below:

For the issued template, Template Property HTML Template was unmarked. Now the definition of this property as stated in the bookshelf is given as below:

The HTML Template setting affects the text you enter in the Text field. It does not affect template items.

But as they say all the things cannot come from textbook, quite a handful comes from experience. So please ensure to mark HTML Template so that special characters get encoded correctly. 

Hope this little but useful information will prove worth of saving many hours. Happy Learning !!!

Relation between GotoView and ForceActive

Recently I have been debugging an issue, where while navigating back to the view where I presently was via a button on another view. I was not able able to see the correct values against the record there. And i have to re-query to get the values what is actually on that record.

On further deep-diving into the code, we have found out that we have used GotoView on the click of a button to go back to the view where the correct values, as I mentioned, were coming only after a re-query.

Now just to keep things simple for readers, just wanted to add that we have 2 options to go back from a certain place to a particular view, which are:

1) Application.GotoView(ViewName[, BusinessObjectName])

2) var oBS = TheApplication().GetService("FINS Teller UI Navigation");

    var psIn = TheApplication().NewPropertySet();

    var psOut = TheApplication().NewPropertySet();

    psIn.SetProperty("ViewName",<ViewName>);

    psIn.SetProperty("BusObj",<ViewBOName>); //Optional

    oBS.InvokeMethod("GotoView",psIn,psOut);

   

While you can use any of the above ways to navigate to a view, but please make sure that you have done the below:

1) Do a refresh/requery via script on load for the view's main applet you are navigating to. Preferably with some condition based on profile attribute so as to be performant.

2) Most importantly make sure that the fields which are exposed to the UI are force active, yes force active even though they are exposed to UI.

Now I want to stress on point 2, as this might seem unnecessary for some of you out there, you might be thinking why this needs to be force active if its already exposed to UI. Truly, we have read that one of the ways for which force active is not required for a field is that it is exposed to UI. 

But strangely enough, this is not the case when you are navigating back to a certain view with GotoView method. If the field is not force active, you will see its value until you do explicitly a re-query. This is Siebel for you. If you know the reason for this or want to state your reasoning for this, feel free to comment on this post.

One last thing, we have read that its not a good practice to make Force Active true for fields until or unless its unavoidable. So as a better alternative to resolve this blank value issue is to Activate the required fields before execute the query in script.

To sum it up when you use GotoView make sure you do:

1) Requery on load for the view's main applet.

2) Activate the fields which are not ForceActive and which exposed to UI.

Hope this help, feel free to raise queries via comment. Happy Exploring !!!

Error Opening Dedicated Application in Chrome

Add to the last issue, I was also facing some issues in launching a dedicated client in Google Chrome, as whenever i was opening it i was getting the error as below : 

Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to localhost:8080

With some of the time spent in debugging this issue, i have found that Google itself given the steps to solve this one. Let me explain how.

When you get this error. There is one link which will appear at the bottom of the browser mentioning as : 

Why am I seeing this page ?

Once you clicked this, click on the link : 

Enable or disable suggestions on navigation errors

There will be below instruction which you will get on clicking the above link as : 

Suggestions for navigation errors are enabled by default. Follow the steps below to turn the feature off.

1. Click the Chrome menu Chrome menu on the browser toolbar.

2. Select Settings.

3. Click Show advanced settings and find the "Privacy" section.

4. Deselect the "Use a web service to help resolve navigation errors" checkbox to disable the feature. Select the checkbox to enable it again.

Also, make sure that you run the genb everytime you compile changes on srf before launching the dedicated client. If this is not done, you will end up with blank screen on the launch of dedicated client.

Keep Exploring !!!

Error while validating Product in version 8.1.1.10

Recently i have been working on an OpenUI POC, and while validating a product i was getting the below error : 

[1] Error invoking service 'Cfg Web UI Service Loader', method 'LoadCfgUIservice' at step 'Go to UI'.(SBL-BPR-00162)

[2] 'Price List' is a required field. Please enter a value for the field.(SBL-DAT-00498)

This error was coming when i was logging in the application with my user id. Although it was working fine with another user.

Cause : Price List of the respective product should be associated with the user who is validating it.

Resolution : To resolve this error, please follow the below steps : 

1) Go to user preferences.

2) In view links, go for Price List & Sales Methodology

3) Associate the price list which is there for the product which you    are trying to validate.

And that is it. Try validating the product now and it will get validated successfully. I hope this little piece of information will save significant amount of time. Happy Exploring !!!

Error(null) involving method "(null)" for Business Service "(null)"

Recently we have got an issue highlighted from one of our environment, where RCRs were stuck in Queue under Repeating instances and tasks were not getting created. Also the below error were getting logged : 

Error Code : SBL-OMS-00203

Error Message : Error (null) invoking method "(null)" for Business Service "(null)"

This error could for number of reasons. Some of them are mentioned below : 

1) Component on which the request is getting made, is not up and running. So check that the state of the respective component is healthy.

2) Component is not having the custom business service mentioned against its parameter Business Query Access List.

3) Workflow version is not the correct one. For this activate the WF from the Repository Version and reload runtime events if that WF contains runtime events.

4) The issue which arised on our enviroment is because the RCR were very old and they are refering to the non-existent WF and hence they are getting errored out. On increasing the log level, we came to know that below error was very frequent : 

ObjMgrBusServiceLog      Error      1              0              2013-08-06 16:00:12        (pmtsvc.cpp (1784)) SBL-ORD-00160: Object stored at key 'HeaderKey' was not found.

ObjMgrBusServiceLog      Error      1              0              2013-08-06 16:00:12        (pmtsvc.cpp (1784)) SBL-ORD-00160: Object stored at key 'ProductKey' was not found.

Now the reason for this error while searching in support web[ID : 503236.1] is because of Wrong version of workflow.

So as a resolution we have recreated the RCR, and since we have created a new RCR and associated the the workflow. It will then refer the latest WF and hence will not be error.

There could be more reason for this error, keeping in mind, for different scenarios. But in case you encounter this, check for the above pointers. Hope this help, Happy Exploring !!!