Bookshelf Home | Contents | Index | Search | PDF

Applications Administration Guide > Working with Lists of Values >

Constrained Lists of Values

---

Some drop-down lists are set up to display a subset of values based on a value set in another drop-down list. For example, if you have two fields for Service Request, Area and Subarea, the values shown in the Area drop-down list might include Network and Upgrade. If the user chooses Network, that user might see a drop-down list for Subarea that includes Ethernet Card and 3rd Party Software. If on the other hand the user chooses Upgrade for the Area, that user might see CD-ROM, Disk Drive, Memory, and Operating System in the Subarea. Setting up this type of filtering is referred to as setting up a constrained pick list. In such a case, the lists of values have been configured to be dependent on one another. In this example, the Area drop-down list is considered to be the parent and the Subarea drop-down list is the child.

Figure 1 shows the values available in the Area drop-down list, and the values available in the Subarea list when Network and Upgrade have been selected, respectively.

Figure 1.  Contents of Drop-Down List Constrained by Parent Drop-Down List

Constrained pick lists (or lists of values) must first be set up through Siebel Tools. After they are configured through Siebel Tools, specific values in lists can be made hierarchically dependent through the List of Values screen. This is accomplished by using the Parent LIC attribute in the list of values record to specify which values will show up when a value is selected in the parent drop-down list.

For example, the LOV Type SR_AREA is used by both the Area and Subarea drop-down lists in a Service Request. The values that show up in the Area drop-down list are constrained to those that have a Parent LIC value of External. Figure 2 shows how the records for these values appear in the List of Values list, including the Parent LIC value of External.

Figure 2.  LOV Records with the Same Parent LIC

o

The values that show up in the Subarea drop-down list are constrained to those that have a Parent LIC value that matches the user's selection for the Area. For example, if the user selects Network in the Area drop-down, only those values that have the Parent LIC set to Network show up in the Subarea drop-down list, while if the user selects Upgrade in the Area drop-down, only those values that have the Parent LIC set to Upgrade will show in the Subarea drop-down list. Figure 3 shows the records for the values that are available for both the Network and Upgrade parent values.

Figure 3.  LOV Records Constrained by the Values Upgrade and Network

If you needed to change the parent Area to which a Subarea list item belongs, you would modify the Parent LIC code of the Subarea list item. Similarly, to add a new Subarea list item, you would add a new record, setting the list-of-values type to SR_AREA and the Display Value, Language Independent Code, and Language as described in Adding a New Value to an Existing List of Values. Then you would set the Parent LIC code to the appropriate parent area. By contrast, to add a new item to the Area drop-down list, you would follow the same steps, but specify that the Parent LIC code have the value External.

NOTE:  The usage of the value External to identify items in the parent drop-down list is specific to this example. To determine what this value would be for any given pair of constrained pick lists, reference the underlying configuration in the Tools Repository.

For information about constraining both static pick lists (maintained through lists of values) and dynamic pick lists, see Siebel Tools Reference.

NOTE:  In the example above using the Area and Subarea drop-down lists, both parent and child lists of values have the same list-of-values type. While this is not required, it has the advantage of avoiding EIM unique key violation errors. These errors can occur when constraining pick lists using Siebel Tools, when the parent and child lists of values contain different list-of-values types. If you plan to use Siebel EIM to exchange list of values data, you should consider constraining pick lists by configuring them so that the parent and child lists of values have the same list-of-values type.

Bookshelf Home | Contents | Index | Search | PDF