Siebel Interactive Designer Administration Guide > Working with Feature Tables >

Creating Feature Tables

Creating a Feature table requires the following steps:

To divide your products into features

  1. Break down your product or situation in terms of selectable features.

    2. For example, if your product is a sports car, make a list for each configurable feature. If the sports car comes with manual transmission, the user does not need to make a selection. Therefore, transmission is not a feature.

    However, if the user has a choice in exterior color, you will need a Feature table to hold the possible values for exterior color. For this feature, you might name the Feature table EXT_COLOR.

    These feature values may also serve as answers to questions in an eAdvisor application. For example, in response to the question, "What exterior color would you like your car to have?" a user can select from a drop-down list of exterior colors.

  2. Determine the possible values for each feature.

    3. For the exterior color feature, determine what colors are offered. Eventually you will populate the Feature table with these values, for example Red, Black, and Silver.

  3. Determine the default value for each feature.

    4. For example, you may decide that black will be the most commonly selected value for the exterior color feature.

    NOTE:  You can also use Trigger and Target Feature tables to determine default values based on previous user selections. For more information, see Creating Trigger and Target Feature Tables.

Your compiled list of features and values for Sports Car might look like this:

Sports Car Features

You will use this information when creating your Feature tables in the next steps.

To create a Feature table

  1. From the navigation drop-down list, select My Pagesets.
  2. Select a pageset.
  3. Select the Feature Tables tab and, from the menu, choose New Record.

    4. A new Feature Table window appears.

  4. Enter a name, without spaces, for the Feature table.

    5. The name will automatically convert to all capital letters. The name must start with a letter and can contain the letters A-Z, the numbers 0-9, and an underscore character (as in EXTERIOR_COLOR).

  5. Select the type of table from the drop down list. The following are the table type values:
  6. If you are creating a linked table, click the Linked To Table button to open a picklist from which you can select the table to link to.
  7. Enter any notes. This step is optional.
  8. Click Save.

To design the Feature table

  1. Select the Designer tab.

    2. The Feature Table designer opens.

  2. In the Feature Table designer, enter sequence numbers. This is an optional step.

    3. The sequence numbers determine the order in which the feature columns will appear in the Feature editor. These numbers are automatically generated, but you can overwrite them.

  3. Enter a column name for each feature.

    4. For example, for the CARS Feature table, you might enter columns for MODEL, COLOR, and PRICE.

  4. Select a business component. This step is optional.

    5. If the data you want to display is already available in the Siebel database, you can access the business component and field and select that data.

    This column maps to the selected column (business component) in the Siebel database. For more information on using business components, refer to Siebel Tools Reference.

    NOTE:  If you select a business component and field, you cannot select a class and attribute. These options are mutually exclusive.

  5. If you selected a business component in Step 4, click Field Name Select to open a picklist. Select a field name from the business component you selected.
  6. Check the Shared field to reference one row ID in a business component. This step is optional.

    7. All columns in the Table Designer that reference the same business component and have the Shared field selected are populated with data when a value is selected for any one of them.

    For example, you add the columns Name, Phone, Organization, and Address to your Feature table, and they all reference the Contact business component. Then when you switch to the Editor View and select a value for the Organization column, values for Name, Phone, and Address are filled in.

  7. Select a class. This step is optional.

    8. NOTE:  If you select a class and attribute, you cannot select a business component and field. These options are mutually exclusive.

    This column maps to the selected class in the Siebel database. For more information on classes and attributes, see Product Administration Guide.

  8. If you selected a class in Step 7, select an attribute for the class.
  9. If the Feature table is a trigger table, you may need to choose a target table.

    10. For more information, see Creating Trigger and Target Feature Tables.

  10. Enter any notes and click Save.

To enter information in the Feature table

  1. Select the Editor tab.
  2. In the Feature Table editor, enter the sequence of the features as they will appear in the associated UI control. This is an optional step.

    3. The sequence numbers are automatically generated. You can override them by entering a different number.

  3. Enter a code value for the feature.

    4. For example, for Black you might use the value BK and for Blue you might use the value BL. Make code values short so that they will be easy to identify in the Configuration table cells, but meaningful so that you do not need to reopen the Feature table to remember what the values stand for.

  4. Enter a full description of the feature.
  5. Fill in information for any other columns you have added.
  6. Select the value you want to appear by default in the associated UI control and enter DEFAULT in the DEFAULT column.
  7. If you have a PRICE column, enter additional costs for particular features.

    8. For example, if a red car costs $500 more than a black car, in the PRICE column for the RED row, you would enter 500. Later, in the PRICE column of the configuration table, you can add this column to the base price column. For more information, see Runtime Access to Your Pricing Information.

  8. Click Save.

 Siebel Interactive Designer Administration Guide 
 Published: 18 April 2003