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What’s New in Dovetail Admin 3.0 : Part 1: Employee Templates

September 10, 2012 Dovetail Admin 3.0 was recently released, so I figured it was a good time to highlight a few of the things that are new in this release. BTW – did you know you can subscribe to our Dovetail product release RSS feed – so you’ll always know about new releases? Employee Templates / Workgroups We’ve brought the functionality of the classis Employee Manager Utility into Dovetail Agent. This allows an administrator to associate employee properties (such as queues, privilege class, business calendar, office location, supervisor, and resource configuration) to a workgroup.  New employees that are assigned to that workgroup can automatically inherit all of the proper attributes. This will speed up and simplify the process of adding new employees to the system, since most of the attributes for an employee will be defined by the type of job they are destined to be performing.…

Dovetail BOLT: Now built with Twitter Bootstrap

August 31, 2012   Since I use BOLT almost everyday as a developer, I committed some time to upgrade the look and feel of the app.  In the process of the upgrade, I also added many improvements to the html, javascript, and sql.   Twitter Bootstrap   The big change was to update the CSS used, and I wanted to use (and learn) Twitter Bootstrap. Twitter Bootstrap is a powerful front-end framework designed for faster and easier web development. It is maintained by developers at Twitter, and has a great community of support.   Twitter Bootstrap was built to not only look and behave great in the latest desktop browsers (as well as IE7!), but in tablet and smartphone browsers via responsive CSS as well. Taking advantage of this in Dovetail Bolt makes it much easier to support and maintain.   For comparison, here is…

Clearing Clarify Cache Files

July 27, 2012 This will probably be old news to most of you, but there’s always new people getting exposed to Clarify, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to share. If you’ve worked with the Clarify Classic Client for any amount of time (say, more than a day), you’ve probably run into the scenario where things start to misbehave. Often, this is because the Clarify cache files get corrupt. The fix is to delete those cache files, and restart the app. The cache files will get rebuilt during app startup. What gets cached? Mostly what gets cached is: Schema (data from the ADP tables) is cached in the <databaseName>.0XX file, where XX is your schema revision. Example: testdb1.062 Forms and other metadata is cached in the <databaseName>.cfy file. Example: testdb1.cfy ClearBasic Code is cached in a boatload of files in the CBCache directory…

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!