About Views

A View represents a page of information in the Siebel CRM application. A view can take many forms, including (but not limited to) the following:

Home Page Views. Home Page Views are where a user is placed immediately after login. These views are typically made up of several regions (known as applets) that will help a user to see the most important information they need to decide where to start their day. For example, a Field Service user may see a list of open Service Requests and a Calendar showing where they have scheduled customer appointments, while a Sales user might see a list of their Sales Opportunities and outstanding Activities.
List Views. List Views are where a user can see many objects of the same type. For example, a user may want to see a list of customer accounts, contacts, campaigns, or service requests. These views typically allow the user to drill into a particular item to a detail view in order to get more information about that object. For example, drilling into a specific customer account will provide access to related contacts, opportunities, service requests, or orders.
Detail Views. Detail Views are where a user can see more detailed information about a given top-level (parent) object as already explained.
Specialized Views. Specialized Views include charts, dashboards, or portals to other applications.

Views in Siebel CRM are defined in two places:

Runtime Repository. The Runtime Repository stores the actual definition of the view. For example, what objects appear in the view, how are those objects laid out, what child objects does it include, and what high-level screen object is a part of the view.
Administrative Seed Data. In addition to defining the view in the runtime repository, each view must be registered within the application. For more information about registering views, see Registering Views.

Another aspect to views is the scope of access that they provide. A given logical view may be defined many times with a different set of records displayed based on the user's access to records. As a simple example, consider a sales opportunity. The sales representatives working on that opportunity should see it, while representatives who are not involved should not. A first-line manager should be able to see all the sales opportunities that all of their direct reports are working on, while a second-level manager should see all the opportunities for their reports across all their intermediary managers. The following are the types of visibility rules available for views:

My Views. My Views shows all of the objects to which you have a direct association. My Opportunities shows all sales opportunities for which a given user is directly involved. These are typical used by independent contributors.
My Team's Views. My Team’s Views show all of the objects which meet one of the following criteria. The typical user is a manager at any level.
- You are a manager and are personally involved. For example, you are working on a sales opportunity.
- You are a manager and have a direct report involved. For example, an employee working for you is working on a sales opportunity.
- You are a higher-level manager and have someone who directly or indirectly works for you involved. For example, you are a director with a manager under you who has a sales representative working on a sales opportunity.
All Views. All Views show all of the objects across your particular Organization. This can be a little misleading, in that a large company may have many different Organizations in it. See the section on Organizations for more information, but as a simple example, consider a multi-national company. You may define an Organization as a region. For example, North America, Europe, or AsiaPac. You may want to be able to restrict visibility to users being able to see only those sales opportunities within their region. A typical user of these views is a senior executive or a cross-functional user, such as a technical support engineer who must support all customers.
All Across My Organizations. All Across My Organizations view is similar to All Views. All Across My Organizations view allows a user associated with more than one Organization to see all the objects within all those Organizations at once. To continue the previous regional example, this would allow separate regions for Eastern Europe and Western Europe to be defined as Organizations and allow a user to be associated to both of those and see all sales opportunities in either region. Typical users are senior executives or cross-functional users, such as Support Engineers.
All Across All Organizations. All Across All Organizations view shows all objects of a given type, without regard to owner or Organization. These views are typically reserved for very senior users, such as CEOs.
Administration. Administration views are specialized views that allow access to all records of a given type and always allow editing of those records, even if a given field or even the entire record would normally be marked read-only. These are reserved for system administrators and are used to repair data, for example, cleanup mistakes and reassign data when it is not visible to those users who need it.