Tag: fcSDK

cctvtmmain : a useful, but broken, and poorly named, utility for closing child cases

October 26, 2007 We recently received an inquiry from a customer asking about Clarify's cctvtmmain utility. Specifically, it was throwing a useless error message, and they wanted our help. Our first response was WTF is cctvtmmain? A little research, and we discovered that its a utility for working with parent and child cases. From the Clarify documentation: The Enterprise Service Manager uses parent and child cases. With parent and child cases, you can associate a group of problems with a common cause. The parent case identifies the root cause. A child case is a customer problem that arises due to the root cause and is linked to the parent case. A child case differs from a Subcase, which is a way for subdividing a case for parallel work by different employees on the same customer problem. For example, suppose a WAN outage occurs…

SLA Monitoring

August 31, 2007 One of the common tasks for a support/call center manager is making sure the team is living up to its service level agreements (SLAs). Pretty much every customer I've ever dealt with has different SLAs. As you can imagine, there's a zillion ways for companies to setup and track their SLAs. Example SLAs: All cases must be responded to within 2 business hours All Urgent priority cases must be responded to within 1 hour regardless of business hours All cases must be responded to within the phone response time as stated on the contract All cases must be closed within 5 days. All subcases of type "Hardware Upgrade" must have a technician onsite within 36 hours. All new cases for a Gold level customer must get a call back from a senior tech within 1 hour. An initial response…

A new version of fcSDK and finalizing the move to .NET 2.0

August 28, 2007 New version of fcSDK available fcSDK version 2.3.2 is now officially available. The big news in this release is that the fcSDK is now built on the .NET 2.0 framework. (fcSDK was previously built on .NET 1.1) There are also number of bug fixes in this release. The documentation details What's New in this version. To obtain this release, create a request using Dovetail SelfService, or send us an email. .NET 2.0 With the fcSDK now ported, this finalizes our migration effort from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0. All of our .NET based products are now built on .NET 2.0: fcSDK SchemaEditor RuleManager SEC.NET

fcSDK Cache files: sometimes more trouble then they're worth

July 30, 2007 One of the features of the fcSDK is its ability to cache frequently-used, rarely-changed data, such as the schema meta-data (ADP tables), lists (Application Lists, Status codes, User-defined lists), geography data (states, countries, time_zones, currencies), configuration items, and strings. When the fcSDK starts up, it reads all of this data from the database and saves it into memory. In addition, it writes out the data to cache files. The next time the fcSDK starts up, if there are cache files present, it loads the data from the cache files, as opposed to having to go to the database. This improves the performance of the loading of the cache data, as reading from a local file is quicker than loading from a remote database. However, these cache files can often cause trouble. If a piece of cache data is changed in…

Having RuleManager invoke command line scripts

June 26, 2007 I've received a few questions on this recently, so I decided a post is in order. One of the features in Rulemanager (both the Clarify/Amdocs Rulemanager and the Dovetail Rulemanager) is the ability to have it invoke command line scripts/executables via a business rule action. For example: if a case has been in a status of "waiting on customer" for more than 30 days, run a script that will close the case when a new contact is created, run a script that will send the contact data to another system (such as an ERP system) when a case is closed, run a script that will send the customer a satisfaction survey etc. What kind of scripts can Rulemanager run? Basically, any kind of script or executable, as long as no UI activity or user input is needed. …

Should log_notes update the last modified timestamp on the case?

June 13, 2007 On most workflow objects in Clarify, such as case, subcase, etc. there is a column which indicates the last modified date. For example, on table_case, there is a modify_stmp column. In older versions of Clarify (including up to version 11.5), if you perform a log action (such as log notes), that timestamp is not updated. In later versions (such as 12.5), that timestamp is updated. The high level APIs in our fcSDK (such as log_case_note, log_case_phone, log_subcase_note, etc.) mimic the Clarify functionality. But, because they've been around so long, they mimic "older" versions of Clarify. So, our log* APIs do not update the last modified timestamp on a case. So, the question is: should our log APIs update the last modified timestamp? I could, but I would prefer not to, add version conditional logic, such as this: if (CLARIFY_SCHEMA_VER >= 59){…

Configuring logging in the fcSDK without a config file

May 14, 2007 I banged my head against this for a while today, so I figured a post was in order. I was writing a PowerShell script to re-create a customer scenario today, and I needed to enable debug level logging. I was building the config on the fly, such as this: $config = new-object -typename System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection $config.Add("fchoice.connectionstring",$connectionString); $config.Add("fchoice.dbtype",$databaseType); $config.Add("fchoice.disableloginfromfcapp", "false"); $ClarifyApplication = [Fchoice.Foundation.Clarify.ClarifyApplication] if ($ClarifyApplication::IsInitialized -eq $false ){ $ClarifyApplication::initialize($config) > $null; } I created a logging.config file that looks like: Then added to my config: $config.Add("fchoice.logconfigfile", "C:\customers\test\logging.config"); I ran my script, but I didn't get a log file. I went back to the fcSDK docs on logging configuration, and realized what was happening. The LogManager is a singleton, and only gets its LogConfigFilePath set upon initialization. So, it has to be set before its initialized. However, the fcSDK does logging when parsing…

Using the fcSDK in PowerShell

April 25, 2007 Years ago, if I wanted to "script" Clarify [formerly linked to www.myclarify.com which no longer exists], I would use UNIX shell scripts, including UNIX mini languages such as sed and awk, that would create dat files that could be imported with dataex. When ClearBasic was introduced, we also got cbbatch, which was a command line interpreter for ClearBasic, so we could script Clarify using CB. When we (First Choice Software) introduced FCFL (First Choice Foundation Library), which was a set of COM objects, we could script using VBScript or JavaScript making COM calls. Same story for the fcSDK. Although the fcSDK is all native .NET, it also exposed a COM interface, so we could still do scripting as we did with FCFL, but we didn't have all of the .NET capabilities of fcSDK. But now, with the availability of PowerShell, we…

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