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Tag: Gary Sherman

Improving case history

January 12, 2009 The case history within Clarify has always been a bit of a sore spot with users for a long time. It was good - in that it made it easy to quickly review the details of the case. But, it did have its issues: Its just one giant text blob. You have no control over the formatting. Its in chronological order. Sometimes this is OK, but typically you scroll to the bottom to read the most recent activity. You don't have control over the timestamp format (DD/MM/YY vs. MM/DD/YY, as an example). The timezone of the timestamp isn't clear. It isn't easy to hide/remove certain entries. Its limited to 32K. If the case history his its 32K limit, users would see this message: THIS FIELD HAS EXCEEDED THE MAXIMUM LIMIT. THE ABOVE ENTRY MAY HAVE BEEN TRUNCATED. PLEASE REFER TO…

Rich Text in the Clarify Classic Client

December 18, 2008 Someone recently asked me if the Clarify Classic Client could handle rich text in multi-line text controls - i.e. can text be made bold, italics, use different fonts/colors, etc. Out of the box - no. Clarify handles plain text only. But, we can customize Clarify. One approach to this problem is to use an ActiveX control that supports rich text. As a proof-of-concept, I downloaded the SpellEditor RichTextBox RTF Control, and slapped it onto the Solution form. (There's a bunch of available controls out there. I'm not saying this is the best one, but it was sufficient to prove my concept.) I then added a bit of ClearBasic code: During form_load, take the description field contents from the solution's contextual object, and stuff it into the RTF text property of the control. During form_save, take the RTF text from the…

Clarify Classic Client Quick Reference Guide

December 17, 2008 Here's a quick reference guide for user options, shortcuts, and keyboard navigation for the Clarify client.   I think Ctrl + Down Arrow within a text box is one of the most useful (and most unknown) shortcuts. Ctrl-F6 is also pretty useful, although I find it difficult to remember (and to type)    

Incorporating Dovetail Search into your Case and Solution Workflow within the Clarify Client

November 18, 2008 An additional customization is provided with Dovetail Search for Clarify that allows Search to be incorporated into your case and solution workflow. For example, from the Case form, clicking the Dovetail Search button will open the Search form, and can search Solutions using the case title. A solution can be opened from the Search results form, and the Link to Case button on the Solution form can be clicked, which will link the solution to the case. Clicking on the Dovetail Search button from the case form: opens the Search form, and automatically executes a search using the case title: Clicking on one of the solutions from the search results opens the Solution form: and then clicking the Link to Case button links the case to the solution. Super easy.

Dovetail Mobile Agent: Only show the queues that have stuff in them

November 5, 2008 As I've mentioned before, I use Dovetail Mobile Agent for my day-to-day case activities. Its simplicity and ease of use really pleases me. Even though it was targeted as an app for mobile devices, it works just as well using normal browsers on desktops & laptops. On the Home page, there's a link to My Open Cases, Recent Activity for my workgroup, as well as a list of My Queues (including the number of items in the queue). But, its not actually all of my queues. Its only the queues that have stuff (such as cases) in them. If a queue is empty, I don't care about it. So it simply doesn't show up. Nice. In our production environment, I belong to 19 queues. And all of them show up in the Classic Clarify Client: Most of them are empty,…

Looking for your opinion on linking cases to solutions

One of the more underused features within Clarify/Dovetail is the ability to link cases to solutions. Its a great feature - I just don't see it used often enough. This allows organizations to track which solutions are used the most, and use that information to feed back to production groups (development, engineering, documentation, etc.) to help prioritize changes/fixes/enhancements. Solutions Solutions have a title, an id, and a description of the problem. They also have 1 or more resolutions (workarounds). For example, take a look at this solution on our website. It has a title:  Dovetail SDK Web Service calls return a Could Not Load Assembly error an ID: 348 a description of the problem: Could not load the assembly 'FChoice.WebServices.Clarify,... and 2 resolutions (which I'm paraphrasing here): 1. run the Dovetail SDK installer 2. copy the "bin" directory from the…

Resize text areas on any page

October 23, 2008 We use Community Server for both our internal as well as our external blogs. One of the things that I hate is the tiny textarea that they give you for entering comments:     Solutions If you're using Google Chrome, it allows you to easily drag and resize and textarea. It just works - nothing to do.   If you're using Firefox, there's a bunch of Firefox add-ons, as well as a bunch of GreaseMonkey scripts for doing the same thing. I grabbed this GreaseMonkey script: Textarea Drag Resize It allows me to easily drag and resize any textarea:   No more tiny textboxes. Sweet!

Consuming JSON in ClearBasic

October 22, 2008 Recently I had the need to consume JSON in ClearBasic. For example, I make a request to a web service, and the service returns a result set in JSON format. I want to display those results within Clarify. JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. JSON is a pretty popular data transfer format, especially for the web. Here's an example of a simple JSON object: { FirstName: Joe, LastName: SixPack, Programming Languages: [ClearBasic, Perl, Ruby] } A real-world JSON example I can make an HTTP request to a Google API to perform a web search. The result will be in a JSON format. For example, a search for "fcsdk powershell" can be made by using this URL: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=fcsdk%20powershell The result will be this: {"responseData": {"results":[{"GsearchResultClass":"GwebSearch", "unescapedUrl":"http://blogs.dovetailsoftware.com/blogs/gsherman/archive/2007/04/25/using-the-fcsdk-in-powershell.aspx", "url":"http://blogs.dovetailsoftware.com/blogs/gsherman/archive/2007/04/25/using-the-fcsdk-in-powershell.aspx", "visibleUrl":"blogs.dovetailsoftware.com", "cacheUrl":"http://www.google.com/search?qu003dcache:u9RLwKjiIPYJ:blogs.dovetailsoftware.com", "title":"Gary Sherman : Using the u003cbu003efcSDKu003c/bu003e in u003cbu003ePowerShellu003c/bu003e",…

Keyboard Shortcuts for Dovetail Mobile Agent

October 7, 2008 In a past post, I discussed how to use GreaseMonkey to modify a web application, particularly, Dovetail Mobile Agent. In my last post, I linked to a GreaseMonkey script that added keyboard shortcuts to Basecamp. Now let's combine the two together. Access Keys for Mobile Clients Keep in mind that Dovetail Mobile Agent already has Access Keys (shortcuts) that are geared for mobile devices. The access keys are numbers. This works well on a mobile device, but it doesn't make as much sense for non-mobile devices. Notice in the image below that each link has a numeric access key. In a previous post, I showed you how to use Stylish to restyle the app.  One of the styling changes I made was to hide the numeric access keys: .access-key-label{    display:none; } This hid the mobile-centric numeric access keys. Keyboard…