July 13, 2012
Seen in the wild – Clarify on an old-school mobile device:
Clarify on a mobile device
July 13, 2012
Seen in the wild – Clarify on an old-school mobile device:
Author: Gary Sherman
Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products
Posts by Gary Sherman:
July 13, 2012
Seen in the wild – Clarify on an old-school mobile device:
Watching cases in Clarify / Dovetail
July 9, 2012
I’ve had a couple of recent business trips to Europe and back, so the long flights gave me some time to tinker with a few ideas. This is my latest experiment: watching cases. It’s not uncommon that we want to keep up with what's going on with certain cases – specifically cases that are being worked by others. For example, a high priority case for a new customer may have been recently created, and even though its being worked by someone else, I still want to keep abreast of what’s happening with it. Or perhaps the customer I’m going to visit next week has a case open that I want to stay in the loop on. Or I want to follow how one of my guys is dealing with a difficult customer. The concept is that we can “watch” a…
Getting the most out of your business rules
June 20, 2012
One of my favorite features of a Clarify/Dovetail system is the business rule. Business rules, particularly notification rules, are a cornerstone of staying up to date on what's happening in your system, and making sure nothing falls through the cracks. As we've been doing more and more Clarify System Health Checks for customers, I've observed that many organizations are either over-using or under-using business rule notifications. Overuse When there are too many notifications, they become noise, and are simply ignored. I've observed many users who have setup email filters/rules that automatically file those emails away, or even delete them. With the overabundance of emails that we all get, we're forced to attack the email problem in some way - and that typically means ignoring everything that's not critical. Except emails from my Mom. And foreigners who need me to help them…
Launching Clarify via a custom clarify:// URL
June 4, 2012
The task at hand is to be able to click on a URL (such as clarify://case/12345) and that will open case 12345 in the Clarify client. Custom URL protocols In Windows, you can create your own custom URL protocols, which allow you to register an application to a URL. In my previous post, I introduced a clarify:// URL protocol. Lets see how we can make that URL trigger the Clarify Client (clarify.exe) There’s a MSDN article that outlines the basics of doing this. Basically, you create a registry key that maps the URL to the application. And you’re URL will be passed to the application as a parameter (that’s the %1). Here’s a sample registry entry for this: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\clarify] @="URL: Protocol handled by CustomURL" "URL Protocol"="" "CustomUrlApplication"="C:\\clarify\\11.5\\client\\ClarifyClient\\clarify.exe" "CustomUrlArguments"="\"%1\"" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\clarify\DefaultIcon] @="C:\\clarify\\11.5\\client\\ClarifyClient\\clarify.exe" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\clarify\shell] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\clarify\shell\open] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\clarify\shell\open\command]…
Custom Clarify Classic Client command line parameters
May 30, 2012
Most of you know that there a bunch of command line options available for the Clarify Classic Client. Some of the more common ones include: cbtrace CBDebugger clfy waggle debug debugCB msg nocache sqlhint sqllog But did you also know you can pass your own parameters and evaluate them? Lets take a simple example Lets start clarify, passing in a case ID number. We’ll do this by coming up with our own custom URL format. Custom URL Format? OMGWTFBBQ! Everyone’s familiar with URL formats such as: http://www.dovetailsoftware.com https://twitter.com ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/ But we can also define custom URL formats, such as: clarify://case/100 Not that it does anything, yet. But it looks cool, no? Back to clarify.exe params OK, so lets pass that as param to clarify.exe From a command line, start clarify.exe with that custom URL as a param, like so:…
Automated Password Reset in Clarify Classic Client: an experiment
May 22, 2012
I’ve shown in the past how we do Password Resets in our web applications. I was playing around with something today, so I’m just throwing it out here. Big caveat: I’m not a native Windows forms programmer. Not in the least. What I’m doing is probably stupid, unsupported, and dangerous to your health. But what the hell. No guts, no glory. Onward. But what about the Clarify Classic Client? How can we do automated password resets in the Clarify Client? In the baseline app, you can’t. When your login fails in the Clarify Client, you’re presented with this: OK, great. It failed. And I forgot my password. So what now? Can we make it suck less? Well, what if we gave the user some more info? For example, on the login form, give…
Calling Oracle Stored procedures using Dovetail SDK’s SqlHelper
May 16, 2012
As a follow up to my earlier post on Calling Oracle Stored procedures using Powershell, one of our customers shared another example of doing something similar. He’s calling an Oracle stored procedure using vb.net. It uses both input and output parameters. Also, he’s using theSqlHelper object from the Dovetail SDK, whereas I used ADO.NET objects. SqlHelper is basically a wrapper around ADO.NET objects. \ The more examples the better! Header declaration of the stored procedure VB code Great stuff. Thanks for sharing Jim!
Calling Oracle Stored procedures using Powershell
May 15, 2012
I’ve been doing some Powershell work lately, and needed to call an Oracle stored procedure with input and output arguments. I didn’t see a good example that mimicked what I was doing, so once I figured it out, I figured it was a good idea to share it. Stored Procedure First, I created a simple stored procedure with both an input and output parameter. Powershell script Then I created a Powershell script to call the stored proc. Overall, the logic of the script is pretty straightforward. Create an Oracle connection and an Oracle Command Set the Command type to be Stored Procedure Add an input parameter, and set its type and value Add an output parameter, and set its type Open the connection Execute the stored procedure Close the connection Read the value of the output parameter Output I…
Deep understanding comes before designing
April 10, 2012
When 37signals recently released their new Basecamp product, it was without a major feature: time tracking. They recently posted about this, asking the community to help them understand time tracking, before they went into design mode for this feature: since we don’t track time at 37signals, we don’t have a deep understanding of the time tracking problem. Plain and simple, this is why time tracking isn’t in the initial release of the all new Basecamp. We simply don’t understand it well enough. Help us understand how and why you track time Before we can commit to saying yes or no to adding time tracking in a future version of the all new Basecamp, we need to understand the problem better. It’s time to observe, study, learn, and understand how and why our customers track time. If you’d like to help,…
Using Hyperlinks in the Clarify Classic Client
I’ve been doing a little Clarify Classic Client development lately, and I’ve found I’ve been using hyperlinks more and more as elements on forms as opposed to buttons. A common usage of hyperlinks is to open URLs, such as a site’s website. But we can also use them to invoke other actions. Here’s a form that has a few different hyperlinks in action: There are 4 hyperlinks in play on this form 2 Open Subcases (opens the Subcase List form, showing the list of subcases for this case) ? (Opens a message box with help text, detailing the Case Title information) Copy Case ID to Clipboard (um, copies the case id number to to the clipboard) Expand (Opens the case history in a larger/expanded form) So as you can see, a hyperlink can be used for more than simply opening…