Limiting the Number of Active Fields

This topic is part of Guidelines for Business Objects Layer.

Field object definitions are instantiated for each business component when the business component is instantiated, such as by a user navigating to a view containing an applet based on the business component. All such instantiated fields are included in the SELECT statements in generated SQL that is issued to the Siebel database, even fields that are not represented in the user interface with a corresponding list column or other field control.

The set of fields that is instantiated includes those for which the Force Active property is set to TRUE. The Force Active setting of TRUE indicates to the system that it must obtain data for the field every time the business component is accessed, even if the field is not displayed in the current applet; this adds the field to the SQL query each time.

When Force Active is set to TRUE, there is an associated performance cost. Force Active affects performance more significantly when fields are based upon MVLs or joins, because the Siebel application has to create the relationships in the SQL query to retrieve data for these columns.

In most cases, the Force Active property is not required. In general, do not set Force Active to TRUE unless strictly necessary.

Use Force Active only when the field must be included in generated queries, but the field does not appear in the user interface.