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Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

Gary Sherman
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Posts by Gary Sherman:

Case Aging, including “pauses”

October 7, 2011 Over the years of working with Clarify, I’ve seen a request come up a few times for calculating case aging, including “pauses”.   It’s easy to calculate a total case age. For open cases, it’s the difference between now and the time the case was opened. For closed cases, it’s the difference between case open time and case close time.   But what about the workflows where a case can be paused? For example, the customer may go on vacation, or any other myriad of reasons where we want to pause the clock on the case.   The common approach to this from an application standpoint is to have a new case Status value of Paused (or something similar), so that we simply change the status to Paused to pause the case, and then change it to something else to…

New in Rulemanager: Support for Multiple email addresses for a contact or employee

October 5, 2011 Earlier this summer I blogged some thoughts around multiple email addresses for a contact or employee. I wanted to throw out a little update about how we’re addressing this. We’re addressing this in two ways – via Rulemanager, and via DovetailAgent. I’ll cover the DovetailAgent changes in a future post. Rulemanager We’ve modified Dovetail Rulemanager so that it supports multiple email addresses in a single email field. This could be on the employee or on the contact’s email field. The email addresses can be separated by a comma, semicolon, or a space. Lets see it in action I’ve created a new employee with the ever-so-descriptive name of “Multiple Emails” This employee has two SMTP addresses in the one email address field: If I have a business rule that notifies this employee, I can see that the notification gets sent to…

ClearBasic cbbatch tip: Display the line number of the most recent error

September 27, 2011 After over a decade of doing ClearBasic coding, I’m still learning new things.   Today, Marek pointed out the Erl function, which returns the line number of the most recent error.   Within the Clarify Client, if you use the –debugCB option, you’ll get the line number of the last CB error, so it’s pretty easy there.   But in cbbatch, it doesn’t tell you the line number. Error message, no line number   For example, I have a simple cbbatch script that I’ve coded with an error.   Notice how it tells me the error, but it doesn’t tell me *where* the error is.   Let caveman debugging commence. Ugh. More error details   Now, lets add a simple error handler.   At the beginning of my routine, I add an On Error statement: On Error Goto ErrorHandler   And then at the end of…

Interesting Business Rule using MTM properties and aliases

September 9, 2011 I was recently presented with an interesting business rule requirement from a customer. the objective here is when someone closes a case, I can use Rulemanager to send an email to the related CR owner.   Lets give it a whirl. Data Model   First, lets recall the data model.   Cases are linked to solutions (probdesc/workaround), and solutions are linked to Bugs (CRs, Change Requests).   Case >---  Workaround  >--- Probdesc >---<  Bug   A case is related to one workaround, a workaround is related to one probdesc, and a probdesc can be related to many CRs.   So we have a MTM in play (between probdesc and bug) – which makes this a bit interesting, and uncommon. Applications In Use   I'm using Dovetail Admin for configuring rules and rule properties, and Dovetail Rulemanager for processing the rules. Rule Properties   We’re going to need some new…

Dovetail signs on as a sponsor of the Los Techies Fiesta

August 25, 2011 I mentioned Pablo’s Fiesta earlier, and Dovetail has now signed on as a sponsor of Los Techies Pablo’s Fiesta. This is always a great event, and we’re proud to be a part of it. Pablo’s Fiesta - September 30, October 1, & 2; Austin, TX Los Techies Open Space Conference on Software Quality & Craftsmanship The Los Techies blogging community is a truly exceptional group of developers, writers, teachers and mentors who love what we do for a living and take pride in producing quality software.  Because we want to foster this within our software development community, we are proud to sponsor Pablo's Fiesta, a two-day open space conference.  This conference will be dedicated to strengthening and expanding a passionate community, creating quality software & constantly striving to be better at our craft.  To be better craftsmen, we need to:…

Schema 201 Webinar Follow-up

August 24, 2011   Big Thanks! to all those that attended today’s Schema 201 webinar. We had a great turnout!     Slides   The slides from today’s presentation are available on Slideshare.   Recording The webinar recording is available for playback.   Links Schema 101:  http://dovetal.es/schema101webinar   SQL View example: http://dovetal.es/sqlView   SQL View that includes case data, plus a column that indicates “how many open subcases does this case have”   More Info on Dovetail SchemaEditor: http://dovetal.es/dtSchema   More Info (and free download) for Dovetail BOLT:  http://dovetal.es/dtBolt   Future Webinars Have an idea for a future webinar? Let’s hear it!   You can leave a comment here, or drop me an email at gary@dovetailsoftware.com

Linking a solution to a closed case

August 23, 2011 I’ve talked in the past about the functionality and benefits of linking solutions to cases, and I’ve shown how we’ve simplified the process in Dovetail Agent. One scenario that’s come up more often, especially around here, is the need to link a solution to a closed case. A common workflow we see here is: 1. A case is opened for a customer 2. We work with the customer to figure out a resolution to the issue 3. Customer uses SelfService to indicate that the resolution solved the issue, and the customer closes the case (and you know how much I love when a customer closes their own case) Now that we know that the resolution we provided did indeed solve the problem, we can create a solution, so this knowledge can be reused, should the same issue arise in the…

Reminder: Clarify / Dovetail Schema 201 webinar this week

August 22, 2011 Just a little reminder that I’ll be presenting a session on advanced schema topics this Wednesday. We already have a good number of registrants, so it seems like a topic that folks are interested in. Cool! Topics SQL Views Many-To-Many Tables Role Objects Pseudo Relations Exclusive Relations Change Fields Closer look at the ADP tables Those are the topics I have planned to cover. If there’s anything else you’d be interested in, please let me know, and I’ll see what I can do. When Wednesday, August 24, 2011 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Central Time) Register Register at: https://dovetailsoftwareevents.webex.com/dovetailsoftwareevents/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=669502491

Upcoming Austin Developer Conferences

August 11, 2011   I’ve been to both of these conferences in the past, and I definitely recommend them  - great stuff.     Austin Code Camp – September 10th   The Austin .Net User Group is proud to sponsor it's fifth Annual Code Camp.   This is one day FREE conference For The Community, By the community.     Pablo’s Fiesta - September 30, October 1, & 2   Los Techies Open Space Conference on Software Quality & Craftsmanship   The Los Techies blogging community is a truly exceptional group of developers, writers, teachers and mentors who love what we do for a living and take pride in producing quality software.  Because we want to foster this within our software development community, we are proud to sponsor Pablo's Fiesta, a two-day open space conference.  This conference will be dedicated to strengthening and expanding a passionate community, creating quality software & constantly striving…

Business Rule Usage Report

August 4, 2011 The other night I got curious and inspired and started working on a 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): As part of normal operations, we collect huge amounts of data and usage statistics in our CRM systems. I’m looking forward to exploring more reports like the above that give us insights into system usage. This will be officially released as part of…