Inbound E-mail Database Operations - Does not Validate Picklists

 

The “Inbound E-mail Database Operations” vanilla business service is a favorite with Siebel developers, it is used when Siebel’s rules regarding business objects comes in the way of your actual business requirement. It can be used to modify records into any Business Component under a business object different from your workflow’s BO. But I recently found an issue in its working when there are bounded picklists involved. Usually when one tries to set a value to a picklist field, and the picklist is configured as bounded, Siebel throws up a validation error saying the value cannot be found in the bounded picklist….. In the case of Inbound E-mail BS, the error is not thrown ie, an exception is not caused. Try this out on your Siebel installation.

The business component Action has a field “Type”, which has a predefault and a bounded picklist.

The picklist is bounded

Now I use the Business Service Simulator view to use the Inbound E-Mail BS’s InsertRecord method to insert an acitivity record.

I have set a incorrect value for all three picklist fields, the values are simply not present in the vanilla LOV system. When the simulation is run, we expect Siebel to throw up a picklist validation exception. Instead, we get a success message and an Activity is created.

Instead of taking the wrong value we provided, Siebel has taken the predefault value directly. If the input value was a valid one, Siebel creates the record correctly.

We had an automation workflow which received inputs from Inbound XML to create an activity, and when the values in the incoming XML were wrong, the activities were still getting created without validation errors.  The solution we implemented was to add a validation step in the workflow to ensure the records had correct, validated values.

If you are using this BS in your project, do check if the possibility of this error occuring in your business flow.