Siebel CRM 7.8 - Signals Demystified.

Anybody who has worked on Siebel 7.8 must have come accross the term 'Signal'. I came across this term just a few months ago. When were wroking for some Performance issues in our Project. It is one of the most useful thing that I have come across in Siebel in past 2 years of experience. It has the ability to change the way we do lot of things.

What I found out during my Reaserch to find out more on singals is the fact that it is absolutely not a new thing in siebel. It has been part of siebel from very start which is way back in Siebel 6. I know you might be confused a little bit. Let me explain.

we all know that siebel is a Event Driven language. We can choose to handle those events or let siebel handle those events.In events we do some coding for the custom methods that we have defined. And we all know that in the end we have to write a statement 'return(CancleOperation)'. Of Late what I knew was that we just have to write this statement otherwise we get and error message 'MethodName is not Supported'.

The reason for this kind of behaviour is 'Signals' that's right!!! Signals are responsible for it. Now I will explain how.

Everything Method Invoked in Siebel is a 'Signal' which is passed on to the C++ code that makes the core siebel. When a vanilla method is invoked such as 'SetFieldValue' , 'GetFieldValue', 'InvokeMethod' Siebel has the code in it is C++ Classes to handle it. But when we invoke the custom method Siebel has absolutely no idea how to handle that code. So, we write the statement 'return(CancleOperation)' so that the custom method never reaches Siebel C++ code.

Now the question is what has changed in Signals in version 7.8? Well, the answer is Prior this version of siebel we coudn't create custom signals and we couldn't modify the existing signals. But now in Siebel 7.8 we can change vanilla singals and also create new signals.

The view that let's us do that is Adminstration ==> Order Management ==> Signals.

You can see in this view a lot of signals related to pricing as they are used extensively for Pricing in siebel. But you can also see signals like 'SetFieldvalue'.

In my next post I will be explaining in detail how we used Copy and Revise Vanilla Signals to rectify the performance issues related to Copy and Revision of Quote.

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