July 30, 2008
In a previous post, I covered some details on Seeker - our full-text search engine, along with its integration with applications, such as Dovetail Agent. One of the other things I really like about Seeker is its extensibility. Via configuration, Seeker can easily be extended to search additional (including custom) fields (such as a custom field on the case or solution). Here we'll cover that scenario. Modify the documentSpecifications.xml file Seek.exe is the application that performs the actual indexing. The documentSpecifications.xml is the configuration file that seek.exe uses so that it knows what to index. The documentSpecifications.xml file consists of many dovetailDocumentSpecifications. For example, there is a specification for case, one for subcase, one for solution, etc. The contents section determines what columns are searched. For example, the baseline contents for the case object includes id_number, title, and case_history: <contents>…
August 20, 2008
The 4.0 Release of Dovetail Agent brings support for parent-child relationship among support cases to the users. Having a functionality available to designate one support case as parent of other cases may play important role in the way your customer support responds to a situation when a large number of cases report the same problem, but in many different ways. Let's consider an example of a communication company with a range of services usually bundled to include: Internet access, VOIP, and cable TV. When a local hub goes down, customers start reporting problems with symptoms like: 'my phone line is dead', 'can't watch the news', 'my e-mail is not working', etc. These are some examples of case titles, which at first may not suggest that all these cases have much in common. Once a root cause if found, all these…
Here at Dovetail I recently started developing on a Windows Server 2008 64bit OS. Today I wanted to install Dovetail Agent as a web application on IIS7. I ran into a few problems. After gnashing my teeth for a bit I found a path to goodness. My biggest problem was 64bit related. I hope this post saves you some time getting our web applications up and running. ASP Needs To Be Enabled I believe that by default when you are adding the Web Server (IIS) role to Windows Server 2008 that the ASP feature is not added by default. Start Server Manager select the Web Server (IIS) Role. Click on Add Role Services. Make sure you have at least ASP and Server Side Includes and ASP.NET selected. IIS 6 Management Compatibility You may also want to select the IIS 6…
August 7, 2008
In Dovetail Agent, it is very easy to build a query against a table in the database, and there are standard routines to open most of the table objects to view the items returned in the query. Drilling down to view objects is a little tougher, but it can be done in a few easy steps. In this example, I will show you how to build a query object for the queelm_case view, which will allow us to open each of the cases in the queue for inquiry. Building the fcQuery object in Dovetail Admin is the first step, so follow along. After logging in to Dovetail Admin, click on the fcQuery Objects menu link to open the Manage fcQuery Objects page. Typing in queelm_case and clicking the List button locates the view object, and double-clicking the queelm_case row will…