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Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

Gary Sherman
Gary Sherman
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A few UI Editor Tips and Tricks

July 24, 2008 Kevin walked past my laptop the other day and noticed an ugly looking hot-dog-inspired-colored window, and asked -what the hell is that?   This is what it was:   Ugly? Absolutely. Useful? I think so. I thought it deserved some explanation, so here goes. Colors   I purposely use the bright colors to distinguish the different elements, along with the exact space each element takes up, and how each element lines up. This is especially helpful for labels.   This is purely to assist with the design of the form in Clarify's User Interface Editor. These colors are not displayed at runtime in the Clarify Client.   For example, here's the same form, with the same controls, but without the colors. Notice that its hard to tell what's what, and how much space each control takes up.   With everything colored, I can…

Impact, Urgency, and Priority of a case

July 21, 2008 One of the best practices that ITIL brings to the party within Incident (case) Management is prioritization.   ITIL calls out 3 separate attributes: impact, urgency, and priority.   Impact: the measure of how business critical it is.   Urgency: a necessary speed of resolving an incident.   Priority: formulated from the combination of impact and urgency. Some formulate it as Priority = Urgency + Impact. Others use Priority = Urgency * Impact.   They key difference that ITIL presents with the concept of Priority versus the classic usage of Severity is that severity alone does not provide enough context for Prioritization. The urgency factor needs to be added to severity in order to provide an accurate understanding of how to prioritize activity.   Example of a priority coding system   Impact, Urgency, and Priority within Dovetail   Within Dovetail (and Clarify/Amdocs), Severity and Priority…

When Clarify grids go bad

July 18, 2008 For the most part, Clarify is pretty easy to customize. Occasionally, you run into Clarify forms that just don't behave as you would expect. In particular, the "old" Clarify forms, that were all written in C, long before ClearBasic was considered - those can be problematic. ClearLogistics forms are also typically problematic - the initial ClearLogistics development team seemed to have their own way of doing things back then.   We recently assisted a customer with such an issue, and I'm sharing it here so hopefully it may help others in a similar situation. Customizing the "Select Inventory Parts" form   The requirement at hand was to exclude inventory parts from a certain inventory location when selecting inventory parts - specifically, on Form 519 (Select Inventory Parts).   Here's the form, showing all inventory parts:   Lets say that we…

ITIL certification

July 17, 2008 I've been diving into ITIL in more detail lately, understanding IT best practices, and how our products and processes match up with the guidance set forth by ITIL. What is ITIL? ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is a public framework that describes Best Practice in IT service management. It provides a framework for the governance of IT, the "service wrap", and focuses on the continual measurement and improvement of the quality of IT service delivered, from both a business and a customer perspective. Certification On occasion, people have mentioned ITIL certification, asking if our products are ITIL certified. So I started doing some exploring of ITIL certifications. The predominant company doing ITIL product certifications is PinkElephant. Their certification program is called PinkVerify. From their website: PinkVERIFY is a service Pink Elephant has provided to the IT Service Management (ITSM) community since…

App.ShowSolution in ClearBasic

July 7, 2008 I'm sure most of the ClearBasic brainiacs already know this (and I may have at one point), but the parameter to App.ShowSolution is a record of type "workaround", not a record of type "probdesc". I probably knew this at one time, but its been a long time since I've done ClearBasic coding. I'm blogging this so that I can find it again in the future, with Google's help, of course.   If you call App.ShowSolution with a probdesc record, you get this ever-so-helpful pile of joy: Cannot map specific relation (type 1 with relation -3). Uh, yeah. Thanks. No, really. That was a helpful message. I'm in awe of your ability to render something so utterly useless. Freakin' programmers.   Working code example: Sub ShowObject(objectType As String, idNumber As String)     If objectType = "solution" Then objectType = "probdesc"    …

Highlighting Priority Cases

June 30, 2008 A common customization within Clarify is to highlight priority cases in a wipBin or queue by setting their color. For example, make High Priority cases really stand out by coloring them red. Clarify Classic Client The ClearBasic Customization Guide has a couple of examples on how to do this with the Clarify Classic Client. However, the customization was commonly applied to the Queue and wipBin forms - not the console. As a reminder: to view the wipBin form, simply double-click a wipBin from the list in the left side of the console. Similarly, for the Queue form. However, since about Clarify version 4, no one typically used these forms - the new console form was what was used. However, the console form can't be customized. I did a search on this to confirm my memory, and found my own post…

Interesting post on Case Types and Case Severity

June 27, 2008   Over on the 37signals blog, they're talking about some of their design decisions in tweaking their support request form.   In Clarify/Dovetail parlance, we have a Case Type and a Case Severity.   It seems 37signals have gone back and forth between the two, trying to capture both pieces of data in one element.   I do think there are 2 distinct values - the type of issue (billing, feature request, bug, etc.) and the severity/urgency of the issue (high, low, urgent, etc.), and I think their post shows the struggle when trying to combine them into one.   I do, however, appreciate that they are focused on keeping the submission form as streamlined, tight, quick, and as easy to use as possible.   I also like the fact that the Severity is focused on how the user feels, and uses natural language. For example, "Not…

DeleteById in Dovetail SDK

June 25, 2008 In the Dovetail SDK, there is a DeleteById method on the ClarifyGeneric object. This is useful when you know the objid of the record you want to delete. Perhaps the objid is posted to a web page, or you've pulled it out of a relation column from a different record. DeleteById is available via the .NET interface. It is not available on an fcGeneric object via the COM interface. How can we DeleteById in COM? Simply use the AddForUpdate method, then do the Delete. Example: var objid = 268435459; var modem = FCSession.CreateGeneric('modem'); modem.AddForUpdate(objid); modem.Delete(); modem.UpdateAll();

A handful of presentations on JavaScript and jQuery

June 24, 2008 John Resig (creator of jQuery) recently posted a bunch of his presentations online, focused on JavaScript and jQuery. Check 'em out. I'm fast becoming a huge fan of jQuery, and we're now using it a lot more within Dovetail Agent. Not only is the library itself cool - but the plethora of available plugins really make it rock.