Siebel Open UI Search & Find functionality as part of IP2013 (8.1.1.11)

The linked presentation demonstrates (under safe harbor conditions…) the functionality prepared for 8.1.1.11 with regards to Search & Find. The UI has been changed quite a bit from the previous search pane. Functionality-wise it remains similar.

Long awaited Innovation Pack 2013 has been made available for download on eDelivery.

8.1.1.11 contains quite a bit of goodies on the function side – most of them related with Open UI. The IP2013 also contains the initial release of a new era in Siebel Mobile solution – Siebel’s Disconnected Mobile solution. Leveraging HTML5 ability to store data inside the browser – enabling Siebel to run off-line against a special kind of local database structure. Conceptually there are strong links with Siebel’s prior Handheld technical architecture (with regards how data is being extracted, synchronized) – though Disconnected Mobile offers a much better CX.

Further on the installation/upgrade side of things – IP2013 contains an improved IRM wizard – which is basically run through the Database Configuration Wizard – rather than invoked through Siebel Tools. It contains far less manual steps than the initial IRM implementation delivered with 8.1.1.10. Oracle will soon offer a new Webcast discussing and demonstrating the changes with regards to IRM.

You can find the IP2013 (8.1.1.11 / 8.2.2.4) Bookshelf here:

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E47915_01/homepage.htm

Oracle’s Siebel Product development is focused to move away from certifications of specific products – by supporting standards. Next in line are the LDAP and ADSI security adapters.

Oracle supports LDAP directory servers that meet following requirements:

❏ The LDAP directory server is compliant with the LDAP 3.0 standard
❏ Password management is handled by implementing the IETF password policy draft standard
❏ Or password management functions, such as password expiry and other password-messaging features, are handled externally to the directory server.

Support for Microsoft Active Directory requires the native connector shipped with the operating systems that are supported for Siebel Business Applications on Microsoft Windows servers. Support for Active Directory is limited to either:

❏ Specific active directory connectors based on the operating systems supported by the release. The Active Directory connector used to connect with an Active Directory schema must be deemed compatible by Microsoft.
❏ Use of only the LDAP version 3-compliant set of features supported by Active Directory. In this instance, Active Directory functions as an LDAP server.

Further Oracle delivers with IP 2013 Oracle libraries for the LDAP Security Adapter. These Oracle libraries replace the traditionally delived IBM LDAP Client & GSKit. The Oracle client primarily exists of the:

❏ Oracle Client LDAP
❏ Oracle LDAP SDK
❏ Oracle Wallet Manager

The IBM LDAP Client & GSKit are not an option on Windows 2008+ if SSL (which will be in 99% of the case) is required. Oracle will not deliver new releases of the IBM LDAP Client & GSKit. This means on the long run customers need to migrate to Oracle LDAP / Wallet Manager.

The practice many of us had in the HI-past is to configure the “Application Title” parameter on the object manager level, to display or include a reference to the Siebel Server. This enables one in a multi-server environment to know in case of trouble which server the user was connected to, just by looking at the screen. Well, Open UI changes the game a bit. The “Application Title” is not longer used, and the document.title of the application is populated in a dynamic way. That is, Siebel will display the view name and record-context information instead of the static Application Title.

Well, overriding this standard behavior would not be the best idea, probably.

So I thought of an alternative, and with the hint of Oracle’s Duncan Ford I realized the following simple solution (see the read text “Connected to DEMOHOST”).

How was this done?

1) Create a small generic BS to get a System Variable using the Clib.getenv method ():

2) Created a System Preference “SiebelHostEnvVar”. This would contain e.g. “COMPUTERNAME”:

3) Created two new fields in the Personalization Profile buscomp to load the SiebelHostEnvVar into a Profile Attribute. The beauty of this buscomp which is not broadly known, is that it loads while logging into an object manager session. At which time Profile Attributes are created, alike the Field name in the buscomp. Typically these are Employee/User related. If you can join from S_PARTY, you can set Employee related data as profile attributes. But also calculated fields are possible, which are used here. 

 
<code><span style="font-family:Georgia, serif;">4) Created custom post loader (http://jsfiddle.net/wSsSk/): </span>
<pre>if (typeof (SiebelAppFacade.Postload) == "undefined") {
 Namespace('SiebelAppFacade.Postload');
if (typeof (SiebelAppFacade.Postload) == "undefined") {
    Namespace('SiebelAppFacade.Postload');

    (function(){
        SiebelApp.EventManager.addListner( "postload", OnPostload, this );
        function OnPostload( ){
            try
            {
                console.log("Loaded custom postload to display server name in MsgLayer");

                var sSiebelServerHost = SiebelApp.S_App.GetProfileAttr("SiebelServerHost");

                if (sSiebelServerHost.length == 0)
                    sSiebelServerHost = "COULD NOT RETRIEVE SIEBEL SERVER HOST";

                console.log("Retrieved servername: " + sSiebelServerHost);

                if ($(".siebelServerHost").length==0)
                    $("#MsgLayer").after($("&lt;div&gt;").addClass("siebelServerHost"));

                $(".siebelServerHost").html("Connected to " + sSiebelServerHost);
            }
            catch(error)
            {
                // silent catch 
            }
        }
    }());
}</pre></code>

5) And some CSS to make it visually attractive:

 
<code><pre>.siebelServerHost {
 float: left;
 position: relative;
 top: 5px;
 margin-left: 10px;
 margin-top: 7px;
 font-weight: bold;
 padding-top: 0px;
 padding-right: 10px;
 display: block;
 color: red;
 font-size: 0.8em;
 }</pre></code>

Voilá, done.

Recent versions of Chrome are problematic for Siebel Open UI. Form applets can be affected, which use a depreciated method of specifying the height of a table as an attribute of the table tag instead of line styles. But for now, we need to deal with it. Chrome seems to de-support the legacy of Siebel applets

This is reproducible with Siebel Vanilla in Chrome only in 8.2.2.1, 8.2.2.2, 8.2.2.3 and latest release of 8.2.2.4. IE8, IE9, IE10 and Firefox all appears to render correctly.

Oracle development supplied the detail which which can be easily implemented as part of a post loader. Likely this will be a temporary solution, when Oracle development will factor out the legacy applets in a future fix pack or innovation pack.

<code>if (typeof(SiebelAppFacade.ChromeSpaceFix) == "undefined") {
	Namespace('SiebelAppFacade.ChromeSpaceFix');
	(function () {
		SiebelApp.EventManager.addListner("postload", ChromeTdSpaceFix, this);
		function ChromeTdSpaceFix() {
			try {
				$("#_svf0 table.GridBack").find("tr").children("td").each(function (index) {
					var regex = /(height)(\s*):(\s*)([^;]*)/,
					el = $(this),
					st = el.attr("style"),
					match = regex.exec(st);
					if (match && Number(match[4]) &&
						el.is(":empty") && el.siblings().length != el.siblings(":empty").length) {
						st = st.replace("height", "xheight");
						el.attr("style", st + "height:" + Number(match[4]) + "px;");
					}
				});
			} catch (error) {
				// Nothing to do.
			}
		}
	}
	());
}
</code>

…a nice feature (or fix) will be introduced, which makes life just a little bit easier while developing:

Bug 18472572 – MWC FAILS TO LAUNCH IF THERE IS ALREADY A BROWSER OPEN

Yes, you do not need to shutdown your browser in orde to start Siebel – sigh!

Further this annoying issue with Tools is resolved:

Bug 18418040 – CLICKING ON EDIT WEB LAYOUT IN VIEWS IS CRASHING TOOLS

A couple of more days to wait before PS7 gets released!

Besides the two earlier mentioned enhancements in my post from Friday, the new feature which caused regressions when it got introduced in Patchset 6 has been fixed. This is why Patchset 6 got password-protected short after it was released.

Object Instantiation Changes Starting from Siebel 8.1.1.11/8.2.2.4 PatchSet 7 and later (Doc ID 1668366.1)\

Essentially this change modifies the behavior of script execution within the [general] section of objects. Behavior can be controlled using the System Preference “Defer Object Initialization”. 

Of particular interest: the phase-out approach. While on IP13 no differences unless customers explicitly selected to enable object initialization. With IP14 the new behavior becomes default, but can be disabled. With IP15 customers are required to adopt the fix. 

How deceiving the results of the SunSpider benchmarking tool are!

Well, at least if you would use SunSpider as relevant factor to decide which browser is best to run Siebel OpenUI…

SunSpider gives more than great results for IE11 compared to Chrome and Firefox. Is Microsoft still cheating [note: I have no personal opinion here :-)]

On my local i5

Chrome 36.0.1985.125

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total: 197.0ms +/- 1.1%
--------------------------------------------

Chrome 38.0.2109.0 canary (64-bit)

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total: 218.3ms +/- 2.4%
--------------------------------------------

Firefox 31

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total: 208.7ms +/- 3.9%
--------------------------------------------

And now, let’s see how IE11 (11.0.9600.17207CO) does….

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total: 118.2ms +/- 5.2%
--------------------------------------------

Awesome! IE11 seems to perform about twice as fast either either Firefox or Chrome.
No question, we should go for IE11. Or wait… should we?

Let’s see how Siebel OpenUI IP13 Patchset 9 (also known as 8.1.1.11.9 – July patch set) performs on these browers.

But then… how are we going to effectively measure the rendering time other than using stopwatches?

With the great help of Duncan Ford a small performance testing framework for OpenUI has been developed. Just a small add-on (more about that in a separate post). What it will basically do is measure the time spent between “Preload” and “Postload” events. That is, it will exclude any CSS processing. Just raw JScript processing time. And we all know, Siebel OUI executes quite a bit of JScript (and with that respect JQuery functions).

Even without true measurements anybody would spot that IE11 is slower than both Chrome and Firefox. The latter two seem to be pretty much on-par.

But to take a more scientific approach we took a customized view from a customer real-life implementation. And used the same navigation pattern in the different browsers for five subsequent iterations. Just to cancel out any “warming-up” issues. And we accessed two different views. One known as “breakdown” the other known as “complaint”. What should be taken into consideration is that the views in this example are pretty large. They contain both large form applets as well as several list applets.

Where Siebel High Interactivity clients won’t really complain in terms of rendering performance when one would add a lot of controls, Open UI sees more or less a linear degradation based on number of exposed controls. Obviously because the compiled nature of the Siebel HI ActiveX control.

So, show me the money! You can see that IE11 is about 2½ times slower than Chrome and twice as slow as Firefox.

Firefox and Chrome are pretty much on-par.

The “PS9” column shows performance of standard 8.1.1.11.9.

The “PS9 + Improvements” shows performance of JScript code changes which have been developed recently by Oracle Siebel development, and will likely be released with PS11 (October).

Especially where list applets are concerned (the “Complaint” view in this test contains 4 list applets, the “Breakdown” only 2) the further code improvements made a real difference of up to 33%.

Brief summary: don’t base your decision for browsers on Sunspider, and yes, there are more than significant performance differences between IE11 and Chrome/Firefox.

Siebel Innovation Pack 2014 – Statement of Direction
Siebel Open UI – Statement of Direction

The IPxx numbering scheme will be Oracle’s major delivery vehicle, as most Siebelists know. Every year, scheduled late Q4. Honestly the IP numbering is just so much more informative. Despite that fact that yes, there will never be a “Siebel 9″ release (as competition of Oracle likes to market it towards Siebel customers). I have always found it hard to tell what a major release entails, most of all marketing driven. The IP numbering scheme is honest and clear to all customers. No more fuss?

Siebel IP2014 will bring a number of important improvements to the table.

To name two enhancements in particular: direct editing of attachments and iHelp.

Both were features lost in Open UI.

Direct editing of attachments due to browser limitations (especially the fact that browsers to not consistently support the HTML5 FileIO specification yet). For OpenUI to have this feature enabled again, it will require Java.

iHelp because it required extensive re-factoring of both the iHelp designer UI as well as the iHelp pane and highlighting feature. But IP14 will bring this feature back, sigh :-)

Further list of OUI improvements:

1. OpenUI rendering performance (see also my other post)
2. Calendar Alarms
3. Drag and Drop of items
4. Catalog Browse – The Siebel Catalog Browse for Quote and Order has been evaluated to support a drag-and-drop functionality for adding products to the shopping carts
5. Product Configurator User Interface – The Siebel Product Configurator web artifacts have been updated to uptake all of the design principles of Open UI. This will allow our customers to refactor their customizations into the new Configurator framework. Style and theme changes are also available for web artifacts to complement the new framework. Additionally, all administration views that support Siebel Product Configurator are now available in Siebel Open UI.
   SmartScript Designer
6. Smart Answer for Service
   Siebel Scheduler Administration View
7. Gantt Chart Resource Scheduler
8. Partner Portal (Quote/Order Home Pages)
9. Organizational Chart or Global Account Hierarchy View (Account and Contacts)
10. Expression Rules Designer
11. Organizational Analysis View
12. Barcode Scanning and Quick Search
13. Email/Print Invoice (Siebel Service Mobile)
14. Funnel Chart (Sales Pipeline Analysis Chart)
15. Loyalty Program Designer

Documented here on MOS you will find information with regards to the net effect of adding the SWECmd=AutoOn instruction. It’s essentially a STA (Siebel Test Automation) feature, but can be handy at times to quickly identify an Object in Tools. Especially the “RN” attribute.

Quoted from My Oracle Support (Doc ID 1594954.1):

OpenUI framework would provide the automation attributes in the HTML DOM

RN – Siebel repository name of the element 
UN – Display name that logically identifies the HTML element
OT – Object type of Siebel HTML element (e.g. Button, JComboBox, etc.)

SweCmd=AutoOn is needed when you launch the application. 

DOM structure for New Button/Combobox with Automation support:
<button id=”s_1_1_7_0_Ctrl” class=”appletButton” type=”button” data-display=”New” title=”Accounts:New” ot=”Button” rn=”NewRecord” un=”New” style=””>New</button>
<input type=”text” name=”s_2_1_87_0″ value=”NY” aria-labelledby=”State_Label” aria-label=”State” style=”height: 24px; width: 120px;” maxlength=”10″ class=”ui-autocomplete-input siebui-input-popup” autocomplete=”off” role=”textbox” aria-autocomplete=”list” aria-haspopup=”true” ot=”JComboBox” rn=”State” un=”State” aria-disabled=”true” readonly=”readonly” aria-describedby=”s_2_1_87_0_icon”>

Enjoy it :-)

You come across the problem that a feature does not longer seem to work with a certain release of a browser. The frequency at which Mozilla and Google release their browsers is at a high pace. And when software change, regressions can occur. Portable apps to the rescue. Just download your portable browser (e.g. Firefix Release x) from SourceForge. The positive side of potable browsers is that they require not an actual installation and hence you can typically also bypass any desktop policy restrictions too. Nice to run different browsers side-by-side without having to install/uninstall them. 

The default behavior Siebel respond to view navigations seems a bit odd if you look at it closely.

You see more or less the UI destroying the current view while rendering the new view.

Not very nice at all. But… there is a nice and simple solution for it using view transitions.

View transitions? You find these under “User Preferences – Behavior”.

A couple of default transitions are defined (more for fun than for anything else…). But adding one is pretty straight-forward.

What does it require? One LOV and a bit of CSS. That’s all :-)

Just add a LOV as per below. Important is the Language Independant Code. I choose “FADE” as the LIC for a “Fade In Fade Out” transition.

Next, define the transition. You can build on the existing ones if you like.

A “transition” occurs when you leave one view and move to the next. By default, nothing special happens. The new view is loaded into the same div element as the old view. By selecting a transition, some alternative functionality is activated which first copies the existing view content to a temporary div and then loads the new view into the a new div. The way in which the the old div then switches to the new div is called a transition and is something over which you have control using CSS.

The primary view content is always held in a div with the id “_svf0“. Once a transition is in effect, the contents of “_svf0” are copied to “_svf0_temp“. Then a set of CSS classes are applied in the following order:

_svf0_temp
siebui-prev-<trans>-begin
siebui-prev-<trans>-end

_svf0
siebui-next-<trans>-begin
siebui-next-<trans>-end

<trans> is set to the LIC of the selected transition after converting to lower-case.

The CSS to be added to your custom theme:

.siebui-prev-fade-begin {
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
opacity: 1;
position: absolute;
visibility:visible;
}
.siebui-prev-fade-end {
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
opacity: 0;
transition: opacity .01s ease-out, visibility 0.01s linear;
visibility: hidden;
}
.siebui-next-fade-begin {
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
opacity: 0;
position: absolute;
}
.siebui-next-fade-end {
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
opacity: 1;
transition: opacity .01s ease-in;

Now, make sure you clear your browser cache, activate the new transition (User Preferences) and see the effect. The performance penalty is zero to none in my own testing. I have asked Oracle development to make this default behavior in IP2014, as it benefits all customers. It makes rendering much more appealing to the eye ;-)

Jeroen

Really nice feature discussed by Neel on Siebel Unleashed. Not perfect yet – but the ability to use the scroll button on the mouse would for desktop users be a need feature. It compensates for the lack of the vertical scroll-bar :-) Especially scrolling by page (Shift-down) adds value. 

Microsoft rigorously changes their support policies for Internet Explorer it seems. 

After January 12, 2016, only the most recent version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical support and security updates. For example, customers using Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, or Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7 SP1 should migrate to Internet Explorer 11 to continue receiving security updates and technical support. For more details regarding support timelines on Windows and Windows Embedded, see the Microsoft Support Lifecycle site.

This is pretty drastic. Until today IE8 would be supported until the supporting platform (e.g. Windows 7) would be no longer supported in either mainstream or extended fashion. This means that in less 17 months IE8 support is no longer (read: security updates) available. That said, Windows 7 will move into extended support per 1st of January next year too… Extended support for 5 more years. With Windows 9 on the horizon Microsoft’s focus is to move customers in a much faster pace away from Windows 7. 

Patch Set 10 has been released. Refer to:

Siebel Patchset Installation Guides for Siebel CRM 8.1.1.11 / 8.2.2.4 IP2013 (Doc ID 1614310.1)

Patch numbers:

19295120 (8.1.1.11.10)
19295121 (8.2.2.4.10)

A big patch set with 52 addressed issues. POO

For the manifest administration issues (18048557) a separate tool has been included which will rectify orphans.

In a recent previous post I already concluded the IE11 is not an ideal browser for Open UI. Which obviously is shame because still the most widely used browsers within organizations. In private life though people tend to use different browsers. But even though the decline for IE is ongoing it will take time before IE is replaced in workplace environments.

Organizations tend to move towards Firefox rather than Chrome. Most likely because Chrome being a Google product, too risky? Firefox as Open source is assumed a safer bet. But this goes at a very slow pace. We should not expect that to change dramatically over the coming years.

So, we have to deal with IE. That is why I created in Siebel OUI as couple of “test” views. Large views which have increasingly more applets and controls. These views are build on top of a VBC in order to cancel out any false-positives from the test results (e.g. to measure only rendering, not queries and fetching).

Taken for granted that I created huge views which you will never (?) see in a typical Siebel environment. But I wanted to take a somewhat scientific approach here to find a possible pattern. View 1 and 2 could be considered still realistic in terms of number of controls in certain customer scenarios – though 2 could be considered pretty outrageous.

• View 1 (indicative: 40 controls in total)
  • One Form applet with 20 controls
  • One List applet with 20 list controls
• View 2 (indicative: 240 controls in total)
  • One Form applet with 20 controls
  • One Form applet with 100 controls
  • One List applet with 20 list controls
  • One List applet with 100 list controls
• View 3 (indicative: 440 controls in total)
  • One Form applet with 20 controls
  • Two Form applet with 100 controls
  • One List applet with 20 list controls
  • Two List applet with 100 list controls
• View 4 (indicative: 640 controls in total)
  • One Form applet with 20 controls
  • Three Form applet with 100 controls
  • One List applet with 20 list controls
  • Three List applet with 100 list controls

If you want to grab the .sif file – go ahead :-) It contains the VBC, Applets, Views and Screen. You only need to register the screen in the application of your wish.

Ok, what have been my observations? Firefox is the winner. IE11 on the other end of the spectrum.

What would be your leading design practice: design & keep your views small ;-) No, really – the should be kept small if you want a view to render sub-second. And prevent at all times to enable too many list columns. The common reason “we need it for export” should be reconsidered. Where that might work in HI – in OpenUI it has severer implications. The JQGridRenderer has a noticeable overhead.

Do not forget that the timings below (in milliseconds) are measured between “PreLoad” and “PostLoad”. Those are JScript events of the OpenUI API. But these timings exclude further rendering time (such as CSS).

Ever had to deal with PDQs which required to fetch based on date functions such as Year-to-date or Month-to-date (or any related…)?

I came across an implementation where a customer became very creative trying to resolve this. But the end-result was a terrible performance. Why? Because the PDQ could not be completely be executed as SQL. 

A generic implementation flaw in queries written by Siebel configurators or business analysts: misusing calculated fields to be used in e.g. search Expressions and PDQs. It can (or will) hammer performance. A lot. 

For example:

Provide me all the Opportunities YTD. This was the original PDQ:

"[Due Date] <= Today() AND JulianYear(Today())=JulianYear([Due Date])"

It does the job. But the SQL’s WHERE clause would only include the [Due Date] <= Today() clause. Assume you have some 15 years of Opportunities. It would fetch all records. Only in-memory the object manager would be able to further filter based on the condition JulianYear(Today())=JulianYear([Due Date]). You can imagine how resource-extensive this would be. Not to imagine the end-user performance perceived.

Similar constructions for Month-to-date and Quarter-to-date queries.

How to circumvent this?

Goal would be to have ProfileAttributes available throughout the application which would carry values such as:

1st day of the year - "01/01/2014"

last day of the year - "31/12/2014"

1st day of the month: - "01/08/2014"

last day of the month: - "31/08/2014"

Well, you get the point.

To realize this you can easily configure a number of fields on the “Personalization Profile” business components. The nice feature of this business component is that all fields are loaded for every session immediately after login. And those fields, well, become Profile Attributes. Typically the “Personalization Profile” business component consist out fields which can be joined toward the Party record for the user logging in (can be an Employee, but can be also a Portal user). But you can also create Calculated Fields. And that will be of great help. Consider the Calculated Fields below (you can grab the complete.xls here).

The “green” onces are the interesting profile attributes. The white onces are just supporting field to make the calculated fields somewhat readable. 

Now let’s rewrite the PDQ from the example.

"[Due Date] <= Today() AND JulianYear(Today())=JulianYear([Due Date])"

The optimized version would become:

[Due Date] > GetProfileAttr("Year Start") AND [Due Date]) < Today()

The optimized PDQ would translate completely into a more enjoyable SQL WHERE clause. It will no longer have to fetch unneccesary data. Let the database take care of this. And of course ensure an appropriate index exist for an efficient execution plan :-) 

Listen to Uma Welingkar from the Siebel Product Management team at Oracle talk about ongoing Siebel product enhancements and hear about continuous access to innovation with Oracle Premier Support and Siebel!

A nice webcast about OATS 12.4 features with regards to Siebel OpenUI.

OATS 12.4 (the most recent incarnation today is 12.4.0.2) supports Siebel OpenUI.

OATS 12.4 comes with a specialized Open UI Function Library which is a fully documented API which originated from Oracle’s Siebel QA team.

The OpenUI Function Library is completely documented in the OpenScript Programmer’s Reference which you can grab at OTN. Scroll down to the bottom to find the link “Download Oracle Application Testing Suite product documentation set”.

One word of care: The OpenUI Function Library should ideally not be an alternative for record-and-playback. It makes most sense to record (re-usable) modular scripts but the function library could be used to enhance these scripts. Building OpenScripts from scratch – you can imagine – will be a time-consuming activity and a maintenance night-mare.