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Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

Gary Sherman
Gary Sherman
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Posts by Gary Sherman:

Dovetail Mobile Agent: Only show the queues that have stuff in them

November 5, 2008 As I've mentioned before, I use Dovetail Mobile Agent for my day-to-day case activities. Its simplicity and ease of use really pleases me. Even though it was targeted as an app for mobile devices, it works just as well using normal browsers on desktops & laptops. On the Home page, there's a link to My Open Cases, Recent Activity for my workgroup, as well as a list of My Queues (including the number of items in the queue). But, its not actually all of my queues. Its only the queues that have stuff (such as cases) in them. If a queue is empty, I don't care about it. So it simply doesn't show up. Nice. In our production environment, I belong to 19 queues. And all of them show up in the Classic Clarify Client: Most of them are empty,…

Looking for your opinion on linking cases to solutions

One of the more underused features within Clarify/Dovetail is the ability to link cases to solutions. Its a great feature - I just don't see it used often enough. This allows organizations to track which solutions are used the most, and use that information to feed back to production groups (development, engineering, documentation, etc.) to help prioritize changes/fixes/enhancements. Solutions Solutions have a title, an id, and a description of the problem. They also have 1 or more resolutions (workarounds). For example, take a look at this solution on our website. It has a title:  Dovetail SDK Web Service calls return a Could Not Load Assembly error an ID: 348 a description of the problem: Could not load the assembly 'FChoice.WebServices.Clarify,... and 2 resolutions (which I'm paraphrasing here): 1. run the Dovetail SDK installer 2. copy the "bin" directory from the…

Resize text areas on any page

October 23, 2008 We use Community Server for both our internal as well as our external blogs. One of the things that I hate is the tiny textarea that they give you for entering comments:     Solutions If you're using Google Chrome, it allows you to easily drag and resize and textarea. It just works - nothing to do.   If you're using Firefox, there's a bunch of Firefox add-ons, as well as a bunch of GreaseMonkey scripts for doing the same thing. I grabbed this GreaseMonkey script: Textarea Drag Resize It allows me to easily drag and resize any textarea:   No more tiny textboxes. Sweet!

Consuming JSON in ClearBasic

October 22, 2008 Recently I had the need to consume JSON in ClearBasic. For example, I make a request to a web service, and the service returns a result set in JSON format. I want to display those results within Clarify. JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. JSON is a pretty popular data transfer format, especially for the web. Here's an example of a simple JSON object: { FirstName: Joe, LastName: SixPack, Programming Languages: [ClearBasic, Perl, Ruby] } A real-world JSON example I can make an HTTP request to a Google API to perform a web search. The result will be in a JSON format. For example, a search for "fcsdk powershell" can be made by using this URL: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=fcsdk%20powershell The result will be this: {"responseData": {"results":[{"GsearchResultClass":"GwebSearch", "unescapedUrl":"http://blogs.dovetailsoftware.com/blogs/gsherman/archive/2007/04/25/using-the-fcsdk-in-powershell.aspx", "url":"http://blogs.dovetailsoftware.com/blogs/gsherman/archive/2007/04/25/using-the-fcsdk-in-powershell.aspx", "visibleUrl":"blogs.dovetailsoftware.com", "cacheUrl":"http://www.google.com/search?qu003dcache:u9RLwKjiIPYJ:blogs.dovetailsoftware.com", "title":"Gary Sherman : Using the u003cbu003efcSDKu003c/bu003e in u003cbu003ePowerShellu003c/bu003e",…

Keyboard Shortcuts for Dovetail Mobile Agent

October 7, 2008 In a past post, I discussed how to use GreaseMonkey to modify a web application, particularly, Dovetail Mobile Agent. In my last post, I linked to a GreaseMonkey script that added keyboard shortcuts to Basecamp. Now let's combine the two together. Access Keys for Mobile Clients Keep in mind that Dovetail Mobile Agent already has Access Keys (shortcuts) that are geared for mobile devices. The access keys are numbers. This works well on a mobile device, but it doesn't make as much sense for non-mobile devices. Notice in the image below that each link has a numeric access key. In a previous post, I showed you how to use Stylish to restyle the app.  One of the styling changes I made was to hide the numeric access keys: .access-key-label{    display:none; } This hid the mobile-centric numeric access keys. Keyboard…

Keyboard shortcuts for Basecamp

October 6, 2008 Greasemonkey script Quickcamp adds keyboard shortcuts to Basecamp.   We use Basecamp for our keeping track of our professional service engagements, and as you can probably tell from my recent posts, I'm quickly becoming a huge fan of GreaseMonkey.   So Quickcamp makes a nice add-on to for my environment.   Cool stuff.  

Clarify Additional Features Forms

October 3, 2008 I recently responded to a  question about adding a Save button to the CR (Change Request) form in Clarify. Dusting off my Clarify knowledge, I gave some details about how to simply copy the Save button from the Additional Features form. I'm sure not everyone knows about these forms. We wrote about this years ago, in one of our newsletters, but I figured it couldn't hurt to share it again here. Additional Features Forms   There are three forms in the Clarify Classic Client that are never displayed in a Clarify client session, but which are extremely valuable. Clarify has placed a variety of controls on these controls that can be copy and pasted directly on to specific forms in Clarify, and they will work for you automatically.   There are two forms provided for ClearSupport, and one provided for…

Using Ubiquity to "edit" web pages

September 29, 2008 I commonly take screen-shots of our web applications, and use them here within my blog. Occasionally when I do this, I want to hide or obfuscate certain pieces of information. For example, I may want to share a screenshot of a case from one of our production systems, or I may have some data that I use in my dev system, that isn't exactly "professional", so I wouldn't want the outside world seeing it. Or perhaps even a URL that I don't want to expose. I used to do a bunch of work, and jump through some hoops in order to make everything professional, hide data, etc. But using Ubiquity, its really easy to change the page on the fly - no programming necessary. For example, lets say that I start with this page: I then invoke Ubiquity (ctrl-space), and…

Commenting on Solutions

One of the things I've wanted to do for a long time is have the ability to add comments on objects within the Clarify/Dovetail system. As a specific example, I've wanted to be able to add comments to a solution. For those not versed in Clarify/Dovetail speak, a Solution is essentially a KnowledgeBase (KB) article. By allowing comments, I (and others) can (hopefully) enhance the information that is within the Solution. For example, consider a  KB article that is available on the web, such as a Microsoft KB article, or a Dovetail KB article. Now, lets say that I use the information in that article, but I run into a bit of a snag, discover another tip or workaround, or perhaps I've even found something wrong in that article. What can I do? I'd like to be able to leave…

Microsoft + jQuery

Totally rockin announcement today: Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio. If you follow the Dovetail Developers, you already know that we're big fans of jQuery at Dovetail. ScottGu has details on his blog about this announcement, as does John Resig. Scott Hanselman also has a good write-up. From ScottGu's post: We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch.  The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license. We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time. The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks. We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to…