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Siebel 7 Adapter Functionality

This chapter provides an overview of the functionality of the Siebel 7 adapter. The following topics are discussed:

Control Flow Overview

This section contains these topics:

Design Time

When the Siebel 7 adapter starts up, using the login credentials and system information from iStudio, it creates and pools one or more instances of the Siebel Application object. The Siebel 7 adapter presents lists of Business Object, Business Components and Business Services in the browser. When you click on one of these, its logical methods display, along with their signatures. You can import these methods in iStudio to create application views.

Runtime

Runtime is the time where the Siebel 7 adapter is servicing requests or waiting for requests. The distributed application in the Siebel 7 adapter is up and running. All calls into the Siebel Application are synchronous calls. The data for the calls get transformed into Java values that Siebel receives through the Siebel Java Data Bean.

Siebel Interfaces

The Siebel 7 adapter allows you to browse and call Siebel Business Services (objects with methods) and Business Components (data sets which you can query and update).

Under the hood, all Siebel applications use Business Components and Business Services, the basic building blocks. Business components are representations of a set of one or more joined tables. They have certain table-like behaviors such as the ability to query a set of records. Business Services are effectively containers for code. Custom business services can be defined using the Siebel Tools, including defining a list of arguments and data types.

Business Services

Business Services are also called "services" in Siebel. The Siebel repository contains Business Service methods and typed method arguments. The Siebel 7 adapter uses a query interface to find the repository objects for Business Services. All method arguments are passed into the Business Service through a single invocation API. Arguments of all Siebel Simple Business Service types are supported. Custom "methods" (function calls) can be defined using the Siebel Tools, including defining a list of arguments and data types. Either Siebel Basic (much like Visual Basic) or Siebel eScript (similar to jscript or Java) is used to implement these functions.

For Business Components, each record can have fields of the following types:

String--An unbound string (not fixed length).
Number--A numeric string with a total length of 22. This total length includes any plus or minus sign, exponent symbols, decimal symbol, integer or decimal fraction digits.
Date--A date in the format MM/DD/YYYY. For the months of January through September and days from the first through the ninth a single character is acceptable.

Business services that have hierarchy of property set parameters are not currently supported.

Note:

Limitation: Many business service method parameters are not strongly typed in Siebel meaning that when they are created you can choose to type a parameter as a string even though internally it is used as a Number or Date. If such a business service method is found, you can remedy this by changing the parameter type to match how the parameter is actually used. See your Siebel system administer or Siebel Tools expert for more information.

Business Objects and Business Components

Business Components are representations of a set of one or more joined tables. They have certain "table-like" behaviors such as the ability to retrieve a set of records. Business Objects are containers for Business Components.

For Business Components:

Their data types are all complex.
These complex data types are record sets.
These are presented as Java vectors or arrays containing Java objects with the values.

For business components, each record can have fields of the following types:

DTYPE_BOOL--Boolean, True or False.
DTYPE_CURRENCY--A numeric string (has no currency symbols, but handles the locale-based decimal symbol, and +/- prefix/suffix.
DTYPE_DATE--A date in the Siebel 7 adapter's Date format.
DTYPE_DATETIME--A datetime in the Siebel 7 adapter's DateTime format.
DTYPE_TIME--A time in the Siebel 7 adapter's Time format.
DTYPE_INTEGER--A 32-bit integer.
DTYPE_NOTE--An unbounded text field.
DTYPE_NUMBER--Similar to DTYPE_CURRENCY but not used as currency in Siebel.
DTYPE_PHONE--A string representing a phone number. It can be of two formats: +<any string>, or US area code and number: XXX-XXX-XXXX.
DTYPE_TEXT (includes length of the string)--Strings of fixed length. The exact length of a DTYPE_TEXT field is visible in the Siebel 7 adapter browser.
DTYPE_UTCDATETIME--A datetime in the Siebel 7 adapter's DateTime format. Siebel interprets the datetime in UTC.

Unformatted DTYPE_PHONE Values

All phone numbers should be submitted as unformatted. A formatted phone number looks like:

(514) 332-6430 x909

An unformatted phone number looks like:

5143326430x909

A formatted value for a record field of type DTYPE_PHONE is a value whose format matches the locale for which the Siebel application server has been configured.

The Siebel 7 adapter expects unformatted phone number values for inserts and updates.

If you submit a formatted phone number value for any business component phone field (of type DTYPE_PHONE), the insert/update will succeed for the first record, but all subsequent queries to retrieve that record fail with a seemingly unrelated error message back from Siebel. If you insert multiple records in a single Insert call, the first record insertion succeeds and the rest fail.

The following is the log exception if formatted phone number values are submitted:

Exception occurred:

Source: Siebel
Error Code: 65538 (0x10002)
Cause: Siebel://exception=SBLException (Unique ID <none>)

6 Siebel 7 Adapter Functionality