December 20, 2007
Dan Bergondy has a post on how to create a view in Clarify that contains a calculated column. Good stuff!
Our customer would like to query all the cases including a column with a calculated number of "open" subcases related to each case record. They want to query for all of the cases that have any open subcases. A normal view would not work because it cannot calculate the count of related object with specified condition. Steps taken. 1. We showed it could be done in SQL (See SQL below). Note the nested SQL statement to calculate the number of open subcases. select c.objid, c.id_number, cond.title, cond.title, (SELECT count(*) FROM table_subcase sc INNER JOIN table_condition sc_cond ON sc_cond.objid = sc.subc_state2condition WHERE sc.subcase2case = c.objid AND sc_cond.title LIKE 'OPEN%') as open_subcase_count FROM table_case c INNER JOIN table_condition cond ON cond.objid = c.case_state2condition 2. Created the following SchemaEditor SchemaScript. Case identifiers and condition and the count open subcases for the case…
December 19, 2007
We publish our knowledgebase articles online: http://www.dovetailsoftware.com/resources/knowledgeBase.aspx. We use the Dovetail SDK to query the solutions in our Clarify/Dovetail database and build the HTML pages.In addition, we have a page that lists the latest 20 articles: http://support.dovetailsoftware.com/selfservice/solutions/recentThis is nice, but it means that one would have to visit the web page to see any new articles.I would like to be notified when new articles are added. Between email spam and Microsoft Outlook, my faith in (and enjoyment of) email is dwindling on a daily basis. But my love of RSS feeds and Google Reader continues to grow. So, how can I get new KB articles pushed to me by RSS?One way would be to go back to our dev team and have them add an RSS feed for that page. Could be done. Not too hard. But that would take…
December 14, 2007
I'm curious - in your organization, who creates the business rules in Clarify?Specifically, who enters them into the system? Is it a developer, a workgroup manager, someone in IT, the business users themselves? A Clarify Admin (if so, is this someone in IT, or in a business unit)?How technical is this person?Any and all replies appreciated!
December 12, 2007
So far on our journey into building windows installers we have gone from just getting started to generating Wix content for all the files in your application. There is an important little something something missing from our toy installer. Pleats (fake product of Pants Enterprises) is supposed to be a web application that runs on IIS. It would be great to add support in the installer to create a virtual directory for the web application. With Wix this is quite easy. Here we go. A virtual directory for your web application I like to compartmentalize my units of install where practical. Because having the installer integrate with IIS and create a virtual directory is completely different than copying files I feel that this piece of the install belongs in its own component. The XML above is declaring that a virtual…
December 11, 2007
A very common misconception is that RuleManager is responsible for evaluating Auto-Destination rules. Perhaps it's because both contain the word "rule". Not sure. Let's all say it together: Auto-Destination Rules have nothing to do with RuleManager. Nicely done. OK, now, let's explore auto-destination rules in more detail.What's an Auto-Destination Rule?An auto-destination rule is a mechanism for assisting in the routing of a workflow object (such as a case) to the correct place.From the Clarify documentation:If your organization is large and uses many queues, auto-destination helps reduce the time a user spends searching for the right queue.Example (in plain English):When dispatching a case with a case type of New Employee, then the case should be routed to the New Employee queue.Example (in Clarify Syntax):OBJECT TYPE="rule", NAME="rule1" UNIQUE_FIELD = "title,operation" FIELDS title = "Case"; operation = "DISPATCH"; rule_text…
December 10, 2007
I recently StumbledUpon IE7Pro, which is an add-on for Internet Explorer. Although my primary browser is Firefox, I use IE for our web applications, including Dovetail Agent.IE7Pro adds a whole bunch of useful enhancements. There are two that are quick wins that I love: Spell Check, and Move the IE menu bar.Spell CheckI still find it amazing that IE doesn't have spell check built-in. In the past, I've used ieSpell. I've now turned off ieSpell and use the spell checking within IE7Pro. It works as spell check does in Firefox, in that it adds a red line under any misspellings. Simply right-click on the word to access the suggestions. Put the Menu Bar back where it belongsThis is just one of those minor annoyances.IE7 out of the box puts the menu bar below the address bar: Using IE7Pro, I can put the…
We've recently had a couple questions from customers in regards to queue members and supervisors. There is definitely some weirdness here, so hopefully this post will clear up a little confusion. In Clarify, there are two relations from queue to user: queue2user, a ManyToMany relation, which is the users assigned to the queue queue_supvr2user, a ManyToMany relation, which is the users supervising the queue Queue Membership in the Clarify UI In the Clarify Classic Client, when you add a user as a supervisor, you see the user listed only as a supervisor. For example, here I just added the user "texas" as a supervisor of the WebSupport queue. Notice that he shows up in the Supervisors list, but not in the Members list. As expected. Notice there are only two queue members listed. Queue Membership…
Many customers use hierarchical (multi-level) drop-down lists in their Clarify/Dovetail implementations. So, when one level of a select list changes, the down-level lists change as well. Clarify allows up 5 levels for a list. As an example, in baseline Clarify, there's a list titled CR_DESC that is a three level list for CPU, Operating System, and Memory. When I change the CPU from PC to Sun, the operating system and memory lists need to change as well. Default values show: Changing the CPU to "SUN" changes the O/S and Memory lists: In a client/server app, this is pretty easy to do, as the onchange event of one list can simply update the down-level lists, either by making a call back to the server, or by accessing data that has been cached on the client machine. In a web application, this…
Now that our journey has begun and we have a basic Wix installer under our belt, we need to get the rest of our web application's files into the installer. Creating all the <Directory> and <Component> and <File> elements by hand gets very tedious especially if you have a lot of directories and files in your projects. Thankfully there is a utility included with Wix called Tallow that takes care of most of the busy work for you. In this post I will show you how to use Tallow against your release folder to do a one time generation of Wix XML for your project. Don't have a release folder yet? Let's begin with automating the creation of one. Build Your Release Folder Here is some NAnt build automation that copies files to a release folder. The layout of the files in…
