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How Siebel CRM Renders High-Interactivity Clients

The Siebel Server uses SWE (Siebel Web Engine) tags in SWE templates to create the screens that it displays in the high-interactivity client that a Siebel application uses. A control is a contained, user interface element, such as a menu, toolbar, grid, combo box, and so on. The red borders in Figure 1 identify some of the controls that the Siebel Server renders.

Figure 1. How Siebel CRM Renders High Interactivity Clients

A typical Siebel CRM Web page includes several controls that Siebel Web Template (SWT) files define. For example:

• Menus
• Toolbars
• Predefined query lists
• Screen tabs
• Applets

In high interactivity, each of these controls, or a group of controls, occupies an HTML frame. High interactivity positions the HTML frame and uses the position and dimension information that the HTML markup contains in this frame to hardcode them into place. High interactivity gets this information from the SWT files that it processes to render the page layout.

A high interactivity client is a type of Siebel CRM client that resembles a Windows client. It supports fewer browsers than standard interactivity, but it includes a set of features that simplify data entry. For example, page refreshes do not occur as often as they do in standard interactivity. The user can create new records in a list, save the data, and then continue browsing without encountering a page refresh. For more information about high interactivity and standard interactivity, see Configuring Siebel Business Applications.

How High Interactivity Rendering Affects Your Ability to Customize Siebel CRM

A SWE template allows you to customize a high-interactivity client only according to the capabilities that the SWE tags provide. For example, you can add a custom list applet to a view, but you cannot modify the individual objects that this list applet contains. You cannot modify a list applet to render as a carousel because a view web template can reference an applet, but it cannot reference the objects that the applet contains, and you cannot modify the ActiveX controls that do render these objects.

Figure 2 illustrates how Siebel CRM uses repository metadata to render objects in a high-interactivity client. For example, Siebel CRM uses:

• View metadata that resides in the repository on the Siebel Server to render a view object in the client.
• Applet metadata and Siebel CRM data that reside in the repository to render an applet object in the client.

Figure 2 illustrates how a standard, custom rendering capability is not available on the high interactivity client because Siebel CRM uses a SWE tag that it gets from the Siebel Server to render each control, and you cannot modify these tags in the client. The configuration on the client is for the most part a black box configuration. You cannot modify it, or it is difficult to modify objects in the client without using Siebel Tools to do custom binding.

Figure 2. How Siebel CRM Uses Repository Metadata to Render Objects in High Interactivity Clients

Siebel CRM uses a SWE template to render each applet directly from the Siebel repository to the user interface in the client, and each applet references a business component to get Siebel CRM metadata and data from the repository. This configuration does not allow you to customize how Siebel CRM renders this applet unless you use Siebel Tools to modify the repository. For example, you cannot use JavaScript in the client to distribute data from a repository applet across more than one pane in a Siebel screen, such as displaying the address of a contact in a pane that is separate from the pane that displays other contact details, such as the contact name and phone number. You cannot use an alternative configuration, such as your custom configuration or a third-party configuration, to bind the Siebel business layer to user interface objects, except through Siebel Tools.

Only one view that displays content typically exists in a Siebel screen, and you cannot add more views unless you use Siebel Tools to modify the repository. Siebel Tools specifies the configuration for each instance of these objects that determines how Siebel CRM binds the object to the Siebel Business Layer. For example:

• To bind the command that a menu item or toolbar button calls
• To bind the business component and business component fields that an applet references to get Siebel CRM data

You can write scripts on the Siebel Server or the client, but these scripts only allow you to customize how Siebel CRM processes the requests that it receives from the user interface. They do not allow you to customize rendering.

For more information about applets, business components, views, the Siebel repository, Siebel metadata, Siebel Tools, the Siebel Object Hierarchy, and so on, see Configuring Siebel Business Applications.