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.

Tools–SIF from multiple objects

Siebel Tool’s “Add to Archive” feature which creates SIF files is a real lifesaver when code needs to be migrated in development phase.  You can create a SIF from different selections in one object selection, eg: you can SIF multiple applets together:

Or you can create a SIF from an entire project, in which case all the different objects in that project get added into a single file.

But is it possible to create a SIF file from different objects in different projects ? Siebel Tools documents how this can be done in its help system, but generally developers are not aware of this feature.

First select the first objects types to be added into the archive file, here it’s applets :

Next, without closing the popup applet in front, use the object explorer to navigate to the other object type which needs to be added. Here, I am adding Business Components from a totally different project. Again , select the business components to be added , right-click and select ‘Add to Archive’

The selected objects also get added to the same archive file, even if they are from different projects.

This can be repeated for all repository objects , giving a single file with required objects. However, on the target tools system, all the different projects have to be locked for object insertion. Tools will tell you which project needs to be locked  during the import process.