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Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

Gary Sherman
Gary Sherman
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More on Customizing the Clarify Attachment Form (form 1006)

December 4, 2012 Last year I had to do some customizing of the Clarify attachment form (form 1006) for a customer. This is one of those old-school forms that doesn’t always behave very well with ClearBasic. I shared some of my findings and solutions on customizing this form.   I had a new request come up this week. How do I enable a user to add an attachment on a case that they don’t own? Plan A   The first thought was simply to enable the buttons on the form.   Sub Form_Load() Me.DoDefault FILE_BTN.Enabled = TRUE ADD_BTN.Enabled = TRUE End Sub   The buttons were now enabled, but clicking the Add button raised an error, " '{CurrentOwnerLoginName} is now the owner, therefore the 'Save' operation cannot be completed."     Bummer. Plan B   There’s a bug that exists in most versions…

Troubleshooting Bad Time Bombs

November 1, 2012 There are times when Rulemanager will report a bad time_bomb in the system. Although it’s easy to just ignore when this happens, it’s better to diagnose the issue to understand (and resolve) the root cause.   This post will walk through an approach to troubleshooting bad time bombs. Time Bombs   Recall that a time_bomb record is created when events happen in the system, such as a case being created or closed, workflow actions (dispatch, accept, assign, yank), etc.  Rulemanager is responsible for picking up these time bombs, and comparing them against the defined business rules in the system, to see if something should happen, such as a notification. Time Bombs Gone Bad   On occasion, Rulemanager will report a bad time_bomb. This will typically show up in the Rulemanager log file. It may also be reported via email, if your Rulemanager…

SchemaEditor and OneToOne relations : clearing up a bit of ambiguity

October 22, 2012 Using Dovetail SchemaEditor to add a new relation to your schema is super easy.   For example, here’s my schema script for adding a new one-to-one relation between the modem table and the user table:   What’s nice is that I only have to define the relation once in the schema file, as opposed to other tools (ddcomp, DD Editor, SchemaManager) where I would have to add the relation to the file in two places (as a relation under both the modem table and as a relation under the user table).   But, there is a bit of ambiguity here – which side is the primary side (OTOP) and which side is the foreign side (OTOF)? Answer   The foreign side will be on the table/name, and the primary side will be inverseTable/inverseRelationName.   So in the example above, the modem2user is the OTOF, and…

Custom Events in Clarify/Dovetail: Change Priority

September 13, 2012 I’ve talked in the past about how to create custom events in Clarify/Dovetail, and how to fire business rules based on these events.   In short, code needs to be written that creates a custom activity log and time bomb.   A recent webinar covered details on how to do this: http://www.slideshare.net/gsherman/advanced-business-rules-part2 (starting on slide #18)   For additional info, take a look at the "User-defined Business Rule Events.doc" available on the Rulemanager wiki: http://rulemanager.wikispaces.com/How-To   If you also want to create a custom act_entry record, you'll probably want a custom activity code. Here's an example: https://gist.github.com/1042796   Change Priority   One of our customers recently wanted to do something similar, but for Change Priority of a case. They wanted to be able to fire a business rule when the priority of a case changes. They needed this to work…

What’s New in Dovetail Admin 3.0: Part 3 : User-Defined List Editor

September 12, 2012 Dovetail Admin 3.0 was recently released, so I figured it was a good time to highlight a few of the things that are new in this release. Part 1: Employee templates Part 2: Reports Part 3: User-defined List Editor enhancements We’ve been working with a few customers who have some serious big-ass user-defined lists (over 60,000 elements!) . Performing certain operations on these lists was taking a while, such as cloning a list, or deleting a large level/tree. We’ve improved the performance of these functions by making Dovetail Admin be a hybrid Classic ASP / ASP.NET application. We can now take advantage of native .NET code, especially where we need higher performance than Classic ASP can provide. Pretty slick. We’ve also made a couple of small but useful enhancements to the user-defined list editor. You can now reorder a list level alphabetically…

What’s New in Dovetail Admin 3.0: Part 2 : Reports

September 11, 2012 Dovetail Admin 3.0 was recently released, so I figured it was a good time to highlight a few of the things that are new in this release. Part 1: Employee templates Part 2: Reports. We’ve added a couple of new reports to Dovetail Admin.  Lets take a closer look at them. Business Rule Usage Report This tells us what business rules are firing along with how often. Perhaps even more importantly, it allows you to see the rules that are not being fired. Perhaps those rules could be removed, or made inactive, therefore simplifying business rule administration. Or maybe they should be firing, and need further investigation. I ran it against our production system, and it was pretty enlightening. Here’s an example (run against my development database, so the rule firing numbers are pretty small): Dovetail Agent Login Report This…

What’s New in Dovetail Admin 3.0: Part 2 : Reports

Dovetail Admin 3.0 was recently released, so I figured it was a good time to highlight a few of the things that are new in this release. Part 1: Employee templates Part 2: Reports. We’ve added a couple of new reports to Dovetail Admin.  Lets take a closer look at them. Business Rule Usage Report This tells us what business rules are firing along with how often. Perhaps even more importantly, it allows you to see the rules that are not being fired. Perhaps those rules could be removed, or made inactive, therefore simplifying business rule administration. Or maybe they should be firing, and need further investigation. I ran it against our production system, and it was pretty enlightening. Here’s an example (run against my development database, so the rule firing numbers are pretty small): Dovetail Agent Login Report This…

What’s New in Dovetail Admin 3.0 : Part 1: Employee Templates

September 10, 2012 Dovetail Admin 3.0 was recently released, so I figured it was a good time to highlight a few of the things that are new in this release. BTW – did you know you can subscribe to our Dovetail product release RSS feed – so you’ll always know about new releases? Employee Templates / Workgroups We’ve brought the functionality of the classis Employee Manager Utility into Dovetail Agent. This allows an administrator to associate employee properties (such as queues, privilege class, business calendar, office location, supervisor, and resource configuration) to a workgroup.  New employees that are assigned to that workgroup can automatically inherit all of the proper attributes. This will speed up and simplify the process of adding new employees to the system, since most of the attributes for an employee will be defined by the type of job they are destined to be performing.…

Clearing Clarify Cache Files

July 27, 2012 This will probably be old news to most of you, but there’s always new people getting exposed to Clarify, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to share. If you’ve worked with the Clarify Classic Client for any amount of time (say, more than a day), you’ve probably run into the scenario where things start to misbehave. Often, this is because the Clarify cache files get corrupt. The fix is to delete those cache files, and restart the app. The cache files will get rebuilt during app startup. What gets cached? Mostly what gets cached is: Schema (data from the ADP tables) is cached in the <databaseName>.0XX file, where XX is your schema revision. Example: testdb1.062 Forms and other metadata is cached in the <databaseName>.cfy file. Example: testdb1.cfy ClearBasic Code is cached in a boatload of files in the CBCache directory…