Happy New Year!!

Time of year has arrived when travel plans, party plans presides over defects and status reports. So i take liberty of being non technical and thanks all readers across the globe for wonderful support and comments with very warm new year wishes.

May new year brings lot of happiness with less defects,more siebel patches, hefty pay hike, hot gal friend or boy friend (only for bachelors), trimmed waistline.

May you get a clean bill from your dentist, your cardiologist, your gastro-enterologist, your podiatrist, your mechanic and your plumber.

May your hair, your teeth, your abs and your stocks not fall; and may your blood pressure, your cholesterol, your white blood count and your mortgage interest rates not rise.

May New Year's Eve find you seated around the table, together with your beloved family and cherished friends.

May every day of the new year glow with good cheer and happiness for you and your family.

Happy 2k12!!

Serialization - Sequence Generation

Christmas has arrived a week early for us. Generating records in numeric sequence numbers can be a burning requirement in any application but not when you are working with siebel.

Just when holidays were approaching and party mood was about take helm, we were asked to generate the payment requests associated with service request in sequence numbers (as third party system required that..no choice had to do it) . The first thought that struck was the usage of * Line Number (Sequence) BC based on the class CSSSequence. However the issue was for each Parent SR first payment notice starts from 1 as payment being child entity and the requirement was that sequence should start from 1000 and should be auto generated for every new record irrespective of Parent SR.

Fear of ending new year eve in office can do wonders and suddenly we found that this requirement could be fulfilled using "Serialization" instead of writing a script. This technique is extensively used for generating Case Serial Number/Claim Serial Numbers based on the region or year. We found it useful in our case. Mother of all siebel guides "Siebel Bookshelf" gives comprehensive details of configuring any custom BC to enable Serialization.
However, we had to run a minor update in order to start the sequence number from 1000. We created a new custom column "PAY_SEQ_NUM" in "S_CASE_SEQ_CTR" table and a custom field "Pay counter" which is used for sequencing in PUB counter business component for holding the sequence number. In order to start the sequence number from 1000 instead of 1 this field should pre-default with 1000. So that sequencing starts from 1000. There is also cool business service "PUB Case Serialization Service" which auto generates next sequence number in line.

PS: In order to have Serialization functionality available, make sure you are working on SIA version and you have access to Administration - Case view.

Happy Serialization!!