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Tag: Dovetail

Converting from Clarify Desktop to Dovetail Agent

July 12, 2010 This is the first installment of a new series of posts on migrating applications/enhancements from the Clarify desktop application to Dovetail Agent features. There are usually a few components involved – schema changes, customized forms, and custom code – that all need to be converted in some form or fashion. For this series of posts, I will be migrating the Employee Manager Utility (EMU) from a Clarify desktop integration to a new feature for Dovetail Agent and Dovetail Admin. EMU is part of the Administration Series, and was last modified when Dovetail Software was still known as First Choice Software. The first things to do is to examine the Employee Manager Utility product. EMU is an administration tool that allows an administrator to associate employee properties (such as queues, office location, supervisor, and resource configuration) to a workgroup. New employees…

Dovetail Seeker Sneak Preview

June 29, 2010 Lately we have been giving some love to Dovetail Seeker our search solution for Clarify/Dovetail CRM. I wanted to share a couple teaser screenshots of a couple features we are working on for our next release.   These screenshots are from an example “reference” web application we are including with Dovetail Seeker to show off all its new fancy features and to get developers excited and empowered to build their own search clients.   The these screens are pretty raw they are from an example app, a proving ground, which will undergo much improvement and change. You’ve Got Your Documents In My Search Index!   The most requested and exciting new feature to Dovetail Seeker is “Rich Document Indexing”.   You select a directory you want indexed and our Seeker will look for files, extracting their content making them searchable.…

Extension Methods I Use A Lot

September 23, 2009 C# extensions have been around for some time and it was a fad for a while to post your favorites. I am following way behind the extension party bus with this post of my favorite extensions. Most of these are poached from Chad and Jeremy and Josh with a few sadly only one of my own mixed in. Below is the Basic Extensions class that is common to a lot of our Dovetail projects. I am not a big believer in class libraries for simple little things like these as extensions that are useful on one project will be useless on another. using System; using System.Collections; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web.Script.Serialization; namespace Dovetail.Commons { public static class BasicExtensions { /// <summary> /// Write string to the console. /// </summary> public static void WriteToConsole(this string stringValue) { Console.WriteLine(stringValue); } ///…

Developer Walkthrough – Workflow Event Handling

September 17, 2009 Dovetail SDK is a software development kit for writing applications, using .NET, to access Clarify™ databases. One of the more common requirements for objects created for Clarify is performing workflow operations on those objects, such as assigning cases or dispatching change requests. Dovetail SDK provides a powerful set of tools to make workflow operations easy to implement. This guide explains how to get started. Using WorkflowManager for Workflow Actions Dovetail SDK supports the following Workflow Methods for Queueable Objects in Clarify with the WorkflowManager object:AcceptAssignDispatchForwardMoveRejectYankChangeStatusQueueable Object Types that are currently supported:CASE, SUBCASE, DEMAND_DTL, TASK, OPPORTUNITY, CONTRACT, BUG, PROBDESC, DIALOGUEAll of these methods follow the same basic model for parameters. For example, the Dispatch method takesid number of the object being dispatchedtype of object being dispatchedqueue that the object is being dispatched totime that the dispatch occurredlogin name of the user performing the…

Mobile Case Creation

July 30, 2009 One of the most requested features we get for Dovetail Mobile Agent is the ability to create cases. Request no more. Wait no longer. Well, maybe just a bit longer. I just finished an update that adds mobile create case functionality. We are going to use it internally for awhile before shipping it. If you want to take it for a test drive send me an email. Here is a sneak peek for everyone. Finding the correct customer Technically this screen was the most difficult to pull off. Finding a customer is typically the first thing you do when creating a case. In this situation it tells us two very important things: who is the contact for the case and what site are they are working at. Looking at the image above I see room for improvement. See this is…

Dovetail Seeker update part deux

July 14, 2009 Yesterday I added a feature that will be in the next release of Dovetail Seeker.Executive Summary: Coming soon, support for indexing against Clarify views.Didn’t it support that already?Well.. No. I was working on a feature for Mobile Agent that I wanted to use some cool search techniques to facilitate and found out a view would work better. When I tried to do just that the indexer exploded with nasty unfriendly errors. What is a developer to do but stop everything and add a feature.Does this great power come with any great responsibilities?Yes. Paths traversing relationships are not allowed when indexing views. What is a path? Well, paths are basically instructions telling the indexer how to find the piece of data you want in the index. Against tables paths can include relations which are not possible for views. This means you…

Dovetail Seeker Update

July 9, 2009 We will soon be releasing a new version of Dovetail Seeker our information retrieval tool for Dovetail/Clarify CRM. The big news in this release is that Seeker now includes a windows service for keeping your indexes in-sync with your database in near real-time. This release also adds the ability to wipe and re-index your search indexes after database purges. Previous Seeker Posts Seeker Introduced Previous Release Post Creating your own Seeker Client Real-Time Indexing Driver Gary and I have been thinking about different scenarios where Seeker could be used. One of them was to use search to replace how users find different types of data. I’ll leave diving into that scenario in more detail to Gary. Think Find Caller using a single search box. One of the requirements that came up was that the search index would need to in-sync…

Searching For Motivation

February 20, 2009 People love search. I love search. I have to admit though that I am guilty of not using my own tools to the best of their ability. Dovetail Seeker is a search product we created to find important knowledge stuck in your Clarify/Dovetail CRM. At Dovetail we use our own software to support our customers and Seeker is always indispensible, when working new cases, effectively mining our solutions and previous cases for knowledge.   That said, I am stuck in my old ways. I’ve been supporting our product line since before we had an effective search tool and whenever I get a support question I am quick to rack my brain and not our knowledge base.   To combat this affliction I created this motivational poster in effort to remind me to hit the search button before I think too hard.    

Creating RSS Feeds Using ASP.Net

February 6, 2009 Warning: This is one of those late to the party posts where I show off some cool thing that everyone already likely knows about. I just feel special right now because I was able to push out something we’ve wanted to do for quite some time in an afternoon.   We wanted to have an RSS feed so customers could keep up to date with new or recently updated Dovetail Knowledge Base articles. My personal mental gate was that I really didn’t want to try to figure out how to properly create an RSS or Atom feed and I didn’t want to bother with complex heavy handed frameworks like Argotic. Then one day Joshintroduced me to the System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace (introduced in .Net 3.5) and my life was never the same.   Simple stuff really. Create a SyndicatedFeed filled with feed items and hand that to a…

jQuery 1.3 is now official!

January 14, 2009 jQuery just released its latest version, and celebrates its 3rd birthday as a JavaScript Library. The big features of this release are: Sizzle: A sizzlin’ hot CSS selector engine. Live Events: Event delegation with a jQuery twist. jQuery Event Overhaul: Completely rewired to simplify event handling. HTML Injection Rewrite: Lightning-fast HTML appending. Offset Rewrite: Super-quick position calculation. No More Browser Sniffing: Using feature detection to help jQuery last for many more years to come.   jQuery at Dovetail Software Almost all of our current development projects are using jQuery, so upgrading to the new version to take advantage of the new features and performance will be an exciting improvement. The performance gains in the selector engine and HTML injection should help us improve our software. The benefits of using jQuery is already apparent, and we continue to use it more…