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Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

Gary Sherman
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What’s New in Dovetail Agent 7

August 19, 2015 This week we released Dovetail Agent version 7. Here’s a quick rundown of the major changes.   Part Requests Logistics customers will be happy to know that we’ve brought Part Request functionality into our latest Dovetail Agent platform. This includes: Create and Edit Part Request Headers and Part Request Details Part Request Workflow operations: Accept,Assign,Dispatch,Forward,Reject,Yank,Close,Reopen Part Request Actions: Create New Part Request, Replicate Part Request Part Requests are available in My Work, Queries, Recent Items, and Search Part Request Header Part Request Detail   Batch Actions – Change Status and Log Notes Change Status and Log Note are now available as batch actions, making it easy to log a note or change the status of many cases or subcases at one time.     Range select On the query results grid (such as My Work), users can shift-click to select…

DIET: DELETE + INSERT instead of UPDATE

June 30, 2015 When we have to insert, update, or delete data, DIET (Dovetail ArchiveManager) is often the tool of choice. Updating an object Typically, when we want to update some data, we just need to define its uniqueness properly. For example, if I wanted to update a business rule property name,  I could define its uniqueness as a combination of its object type + name. For example: OBJECT TYPE="prop_name", NAME="commitment case id" UNIQUE_FIELD=obj_type, prop_name FIELDS obj_type=30; /* object type 30 = commit_log */ prop_name="Case ID"; path_name="case_commit2case:id_number"; subtype=0; val_type=0; max_len=255; END_FIELDS END_OBJECT NAME="commitment case id" If I used DIET to import this file, and this prop_name  record didn’t exist in the database, then it would do an INSERT, which would create this prop_name record. If I used DIET to import this file, and this prop_name record did exist in the database, then it…

What’s New in Dovetail Agent 6

June 24, 2015 This week we released Dovetail Agent version 6. Here’s a quick rundown of the major changes.   Faster all around We’ve improved performance throughout the application, both on the front and back-end. On the back-end, we’ve upgraded our major infrastructure components (including FUBU MVC, StructureMap, and Dovetail SDK), which improves the application startup time, as well as improves the time to process every request. We’ve also made improvements to the SQL generation module, which improves the performance of many database queries. In addition, queries are no longer executed on items without any relevant filters, which means fewer queries and better overall performance. On the front-end, Dovetail Agent is now a true SPA (Single Page Application), which means navigating through the application is much faster. There are less requests from the client to the server, and less data (scripts, templates, css,…

Debugging an IE 9 crash

June 23, 2015 Our Dovetail Agent app is supported on Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Since Chrome and Firefox auto-update, users are typically on the most current version. IE is a different story, which pretty much all of us in the tech community are well aware. Continuing to support older versions of IE is more and more difficult. But, we are sensitive to the challenges of upgrading IE in enterprise environments. For Dovetail Agent, we support IE 9, 10, and 11. IE 9 has its challenges for sure. Many organizations have stopped supporting older versions of IE, including Google.  And Microsoft recently announced that they were dropping support of older versions of IE. Barrett Sonntag (one of our developers here at Dovetail) has written a post outlining a recent challenge we ran into where IE9 would crash when dragging, scrolling, and updating styles.…

Troubleshooting a bad business rule

June 16, 2015 When Dovetail Rulemanager has a problem processing a business rule for some reason, it logs the problem. We can use these logs to help determine exactly what the problem is, and how to fix it. We’ll walk through an example on troubleshooting a specific issue. In this scenario, Rulemanager logged an error: 2015-06-12 10:23:07 [Consumer7] ERROR FChoice.RuleManager.OperandException - FChoice.RuleManager.OperandException: (-1) Invalid operand format for an IsIn operator. It looks like there was a problem with a rule condition that uses an IsIn operator. So how do we know which rule this is referring to? There may be hundreds of rules in the system. All of the needed information is contained in the log file. But since Rulemanager is a super busy application, and it’s multi-threaded, the logs contain a LOT of information. In a log file I recently received from…

Seek and ye shall find – the power of Search in Dovetail apps

June 12, 2015 A common fixture in our apps is the ubiquitous search box.  It’s available in Dovetail Agent, Dovetail Mobile, Dovetail Agent Lite, and Dovetail SelfService. It’s even available for the Clarify Classic Client.The heavy lifting for search is all handled on the back end by the Dovetail Seeker application. But the front-end is what users interact with, so we’ll cover that here.(BTW - If you’re looking for information on Dovetail Seeker, check out one of these posts, or review the docs.)On the surface, it’s pretty easy to use – put in some search terms and find what you’re looking for.  But there’s a lot more power available, and I wanted to touch on a few of these options.For the most part, I’ll cover search within Dovetail Agent, although much of this applies to all of our applications.What can we search for?Out…

File uploads in Dovetail Agent

June 9, 2015 Adding files to an item in Dovetail Agent is a pretty common activity. File attachments are supported on the following items: cases subcases solutions contracts site parts accounts We’ve made it super easy to add a file, which uploads it to the server and “attaches” it to the item. File attachments are stored in a common location on the server. Gone are the days of file attachments in the Clarify Classic Client where a file attachment resided on someone’s C drive, and couldn’t be accessed by anyone except the user who added the file attachment. Plus-One On each item, there’s a Files tab. Click on the tab, then click the + on the tab header. (From a development standpoint, we commonly refer to this as our plus-one pattern, where you click the plus sign to add one more related item)…

Closing a number of cases at once

June 5, 2015 Occasionally we get requests about closing a bunch of cases at once. Some people refer to it as a “mass case closing”, others use the term “batch case close”. Whatever you call it, it’s easy to do in Dovetail Agent. This request comes up when a bunch of test cases get created, or if a customer goes out of support, or a bad email loop creates cases by mistake, or a myriad of other reasons. Find the cases you want to close First step - create a query for the cases you want to close. I want open cases created in the last 365 days with the word “test” in the title. So, I created a query with 4 filters: Condition Starts with Open Item Type Is Equal To case Created within last (days) 365 Title Contains test Run the…