Siebel: Custom Functions for TheApplication

If you want to reuse code in Siebel, one of the common practices is to put it away in the business service and invoke those methods. This method, though is invaluable for complex operations, will become a painful process for simple things. When I say painful, it applies in some measure for both developers and the execution engine, reasons outlined below:

1. Additional business service objects have to be created during execution, this may put some overhead in terms of performance (business service caching kept aside for now)
2. Invoking most of the business services out there involves creation of property sets and calling them in a "proper" way. With the increased lines of code comes the increased complexity
3. Developers have to "know" about the business service. This is a big problem in the longer term since code again gets littered everywhere inspite of the same functionality in a service
   There is a way to solve some of the above issues for simple reusable code (at least partially) - custom methods on TheApplication object. This uses a simple fact - all functions written in the application object will be available in any entity and method. Let us illustrate this with an example.

Problem: I need to get the description of a specified LOV. Though developers swear by LookupValue (and other Lookup) functions, there is little one can do about the 30 (or 50) char limit imposed by the data model. It is common to use Description (or some such field) for this purpose, but the code reuse is limited.

Solution: Write a LookupDesc function in the application object. Just edit the 'Siebel Life Sciences' (or any application) that is being used by your object manager. Create a new function called 'LookupDesc' and paste this code:

function LookupDesc(Type, Value)
{
try {
var sDesc = "";
var boLOV = TheApplication().GetBusObject("List Of Values");
var bcLOV = boLOV.GetBusComp("List Of Values");
with (bcLOV) {
ClearToQuery();
SetViewMode(AllView);
ActivateField("Description");
SetSearchExpr("[Type]='" + Type + "' AND [Value] = '" + Value + "'");
ExecuteQuery(ForwardOnly);
if (FirstRecord()) sDesc = GetFieldValue("Description");
} //with
return(sDesc);
}
catch(e) {
throw(e);
}
finally {
bcLOV = null;
boLOV = null;
}
}

Now, invoking the above function is by using a single line in applet, bc or a business service -

TheApplication().LookupDesc("MY_TYPE", "My Value")

This is also available in ScriptAssist against TheApplication, to make others aware of this function ofcourse!
A note of caution though - don't overdo this. I would recommend keeping the code here simple and tight, and to those functions where lot of reuse is foreseen.