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Optimized Views

May 31, 2013 Within your Clarify / Dovetail schema, there’s a concept of an Optimized View. This is really an implicit feature of a view, but if you’re aware of it, and understand how they work, you can use it to your advantage.   An optimized view happens when you have a join to a table, but the only field that you’re including from the joined in table is the objid field, and the relation type from the main table to the joined table is a OTOP or MTO.   When these conditions are met, then the schema editing tools (ddcomp, SchemaManager, Dovetail SchemaEditor) will optimize the underlying view, meaning that it will not actually create a join to the table, but instead will simply use the column from the main table as part of the select clause.   That’s a bunch of info…

Troubleshooting Bad Time Bombs

November 1, 2012 There are times when Rulemanager will report a bad time_bomb in the system. Although it’s easy to just ignore when this happens, it’s better to diagnose the issue to understand (and resolve) the root cause.   This post will walk through an approach to troubleshooting bad time bombs. Time Bombs   Recall that a time_bomb record is created when events happen in the system, such as a case being created or closed, workflow actions (dispatch, accept, assign, yank), etc.  Rulemanager is responsible for picking up these time bombs, and comparing them against the defined business rules in the system, to see if something should happen, such as a notification. Time Bombs Gone Bad   On occasion, Rulemanager will report a bad time_bomb. This will typically show up in the Rulemanager log file. It may also be reported via email, if your Rulemanager…

SchemaEditor and OneToOne relations : clearing up a bit of ambiguity

October 22, 2012 Using Dovetail SchemaEditor to add a new relation to your schema is super easy.   For example, here’s my schema script for adding a new one-to-one relation between the modem table and the user table:   What’s nice is that I only have to define the relation once in the schema file, as opposed to other tools (ddcomp, DD Editor, SchemaManager) where I would have to add the relation to the file in two places (as a relation under both the modem table and as a relation under the user table).   But, there is a bit of ambiguity here – which side is the primary side (OTOP) and which side is the foreign side (OTOF)? Answer   The foreign side will be on the table/name, and the primary side will be inverseTable/inverseRelationName.   So in the example above, the modem2user is the OTOF, and…

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…

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…

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

SDK based web apps in a 64-bit environment

June 17, 2011 I wanted to drop a little update regarding some upcoming changes, specifically in regards to our classic web applications (Dovetail Agent, Dovetail Admin, and Dovetail SelfService) operating in a 64-bit environment.   If you’re not running one of those web apps in a 64-bit environment, then don’t sweat this post – head off and read something more interesting :) Currently, we require our classic web apps to run in a 32-bit mode. Why? Because the Dovetail SDK is currently 32-bit only but that will change with SDK version 3.0.   Update: 3/28/2012:   Now that Dovetail SDK 3.0 has been released (which supports both 32 and 64-bit COM objects), I wanted to drop a little update here.   Dovetail Agent 4.5 can now be run in 64-bit mode. This requires the 64-bit version of SDK (version 3.0 or higher) be installed.   Dovetail Admin (any version) can…

Multiple email addresses for a contact or employee

June 10, 2011 In today’s modern age, many people have multiple email addresses. They may have a work email, a home email, a personal email, etc. I think I may have at least 1/2 a dozen.   In Clarify (and Dovetail), there’s one field for specifying an email address. Back in 1990, it was uncommon that people had multiple email addresses, so a single field was sufficient.   But what do we do when a contact has multiple email addresses? Where do we store that info?   I’ve seen systems where multiple custom fields are created, such as: table_contact.x_home_email table_contact.x_work_email table_contact.x_alternate_email table_contact.x_alternate_email2   etc.   Yuck.   I’ve also seen systems where multiple email addresses are crammed into the one existing email field.   Yuck again. How about…   I think what would be useful is a table that allowed for many email…

Schema 101 Webinar Follow-up

May 17, 2011 Big Thanks! to all those that attended today’s webinar on Schema 101. Slides The slides from today’s presentation are available on Slideshare.   Recording The webinar recording is available for playback. Links More Info on Dovetail SchemaEditor: http://dovetal.es/dtSchema   More Info (and free download) for Dovetail BOLT:  http://dovetal.es/dtBolt Schema 201   Interested in a more advanced session? I’m considering doing a Schema 201 session, including items such as SQL Views, Database Flags, Change Fields, Pseudo Relations, MTM tables, ADP in more detail, etc.   If this is something you’re interested in – please let me know! I’ll probably only do this if there’s enough interest up front.   You can leave a comment here, or drop me an email at gary@dovetailsoftware.com