How to build Siebel Workflow Expression?

I remember my days when i started with Siebel, I just couldn't get the syntax of workflow expression correct. I still see newbies of siebel struggling to get it right the first time. In this post I would try to make the basic rules of workflow expressions as simple as possible.

Basic Rules of Siebel Workflow Expression are :

1. Siebel Workflow takes String as input.
2. + (plus) is the concatenation operator.
3.  Process properties can be referred using & operator like this > [&Object Id] 
4.  Don't worry about spaces in process property names, they are allowed.

Let's take an simple example where we want to build the expression to search for records with Contact Id specified in Object Id the search spec would be:

if Object id contains : 1-12345 then expression will be evaluated as :

Did I say its a H.U.G ?

See what is the difference between Expression Business Component and Filter Business Component


Hope it helps. If you know similar topic and want to share with Siebel community, please post it in comments below. I will post it as blog post.

JSON and Siebel

View new eScript based solution to create JSON Strings in Siebel.

JSON(JavaScript Object Notation) is a new lightweight integration message format which is replacing XML in thin client integrations. There are no meta tags and data description in JSON as in XML, it is just a string representation of JavaScript Object, it is designed to help javascript code to convert data to string and string to data without considerable overhead.

JSON vs XML

Many companies have started replacing XML with JSON in APIs. All the APIs of Google (Maps,Mail,Calendar, plus etc are now serving JSON), Twitter API,  Facebook apps and interfaces are built using JSON.
Read more on JSON on : http://www.json.org/

Siebel lacks in support of JSON on server side. Oracle support recommends use of workarounds such as using custom scripting to parse JSON response received by Siebel.

So how to interpret json in Siebel? Answer lies in the escript engine of Siebel. Siebel eScript as we know is actually ECMA script which was basis of Javascript. That is why the syntax of Javascript and eScript closely matches each other.

ECMA adopted JSON before it became standard in javascript. Thus our well known Siebel eScript also have some support.

Installing Siebel 8.1.1.10 on Windows 8

Installing Siebel Tools and Web Client can be very daunting sometimes, especially when you trying to install  a new Version of Siebel on a new operating system. I spent many weeks to get my Siebel 8.1.1.10 (technically ver 8.1.1.10.0) self learning environment on Windows 8 and as expected process was difficult.

Every step in installing there was some sort of issue, I have created list of issues I found and the work around. I have divided steps into posts:

Downloading Siebel Jar file from Oracle
Creating Siebel Install Image
Installing Siebel 8.1.1
Patching Siebel 8.1.1.10

Before proceeding with the steps please be informed about following: 

1. Siebel 8.1.1.10 Tools and Client can not be installed at directly, you will have to install Siebel 8.1.1 first and then create patch-set to install Siebel 8.1.1.10. However it is possible to create single Siebel 8.1.1.10 Server installation image.
2. You should have administrator privileges and have the latest version of JRE from java.com
3. You would need oracle accoun to access and download all the files from  Oracle Software Delivery Cloud  required for Siebel 8.1.1 and Siebel 8.1.1.10

Disclaimer: Windows 8 is not supported/recommended platform for Siebel, please use solutions provided at your own discretion.

How to take backup of Siebel Tables?

This article explains how to take backup of Siebel Tables or any other table in Oracle database. It is a good practice to take backup of data before making any changes to schema or before updating bulk records. However Siebel does not provide any archiving or data backup solution out of the box.

There are couple of solutions available if you are using oracle database, some of them are:
1. First option is to copy the table with all the data into a new table in same or any other database.As compared with the any other option turnaround time is very less, as this command executes on the server and there is no payload transferred between client and server.

This can be done with the help of create table command with select statement.

CREATE TABLE new_table  AS (SELECT * FROM old_table);

How to increment date in Siebel workflows?

It is supposed to be the one of the toughest task in e-script is to handle date fields and manipulate the data. Recently I learned it is fairly simple to manipulate the date values in Siebel Workflows as compared to e-script.

This revelation goes to Naresh Lalam from siebel.ittoolbox . After his one of the comments I went up and verified that date fields can be simply manipulated from expression of Workflow Process

Provided :

1: Process Proerty storing Date is of type : Date

2: Number of days which needs to subtracted to added should be integer.

Output Arguments

On simulating these expression it results extremely simple output.

Workflow Process Properties

Credit : Naresh

cheers :)

Restrict certain queries on BC/EBC/VBC : GetSearchExpr()

Recently someone posted requirement on it toolbox to capture and change the queries executed by user on certain Siebel business components.

Few consultant suggested use pre query event of business component to change the search spec using GetSearchExpr and SetSearchExpr, however it is not possible to achieve this without releasing srf.

Perhaps there was a solution which could be achieved without releasing srf.In such type of requirements we can use Siebel Run Time events and client side business services which are independent of srf release.