Siebel Product Administration Guide > Creating Custom Siebel Configurator User Interfaces >

About Themes for the Siebel Configurator

When you create a work space for a customizable product, you can select a base theme and product theme. These control the basic look and feel of the pages a user sees when they configure the product.

About the Base Theme

A base theme defines the home page for the customizable product. It is the container within which the product theme pages display. The base theme has a thread bar you can use to navigate between product theme pages. Two types of base theme are provided:

• Base Theme with Auto Pricing. When the user selects an item, its price is updated immediately.
• Base Theme with Manual Pricing. The pricing of items is not updated until the user clicks Update Price.
• Base Theme with Multi Select JS. The user can select many product components, and then click the Submit button to validate them all at once.
• Base Theme with Quick Edit JS. The user can turn validation on and off. Turning validation off saves time in configuring items.

Although both Multi Select and Quick Edit allow users to configure products more quickly, there are important differences between the two:

• Constraint validation:
  • A Multi Select user interface can invoke constraint validation for certain user actions, such as page refresh or selections using combo boxes. For example, when a user drills down on a child customizable product or changes tabs, the UI controls on the new page invoke object manager code which invokes the constraint engine and prompts the user to validate the Siebel Configurator session.
  • With a Quick Edit user interface, the user enables or disables the constraint engine by explicitly clicking a button.
• Modification by the user:
  • With a Multi Select user interface, the underlying logic for altering constraint engine invocation and constraint violation behavior can be changed by modifying the client side Javascript files.

With a Quick Edit user interface, logic for altering the constraint engine cannot be modified by end users, because it resides in the object manager code.

Upgrade users: If you do not select a base or product theme, default themes are used. If you do not specify groups or controls, intelligent defaults are used. These defaults replace Configuration Assistant in release 6.x and lower.

About Product Themes

Product themes specify the style used to group items together on selection pages. You define which items appear on a page by defining groups in the User Interface view and adding products to the groups. Each group is displayed on a separate selection page.

Three basic product theme types are provided.

• Tab Product Theme

  The items in each group are displayed on a separate page, as shown in Figure 5. The Stereos group and the Options group each have a tab, and the user can move between pages by clicking the tab. A standard group of buttons, Save, Cancel, Done, and Finish It display above the tabs. A Red Star displays next to the title of the Stereos page to indicate that the user is required to choose an item and has not done so.

  

  Figure 5. Tab Product Theme

• Wizard Product Theme

  The items in each group are presented on separate pages, as shown in Figure 6. The Stereos group is displayed by itself as the first page in the sequence. A standard group of buttons, Save, Cancel, Done, and Finish It display above the page. A Red Star displays next to the title of the Stereos page to indicate that the user is required to choose an item and has not done so. Previous and Next buttons, located within the page, allow the user to move between pages.

  

  Figure 6. Wizard Product Theme

• Single Page Product Theme

  All the groups in the customizable product are presented on a single selection page, as shown in Figure 7. The tab pages used in the Tab theme and Wizard theme are stacked vertically one beneath the other to form the selection page. A standard group of buttons, Save, Cancel, Done, and Finish It display at the top of the selection page. A Red Star displays next to the title of the Stereos group to indicate that the user is required to choose an item and has not done so.

  The top portion of the page, containing the product name and standard buttons, is not shown in the figure.

  

  Figure 7. Single Page Product Theme