Close Task Pane Automatically [ID 781860.1]

[Problem]

In Siebel 8, when a Task Based UI (TBUI) session is completed the task pane remains open, displaying the default task (which could be totally unrelated to the current view), even after the user clicks Submit.

This problem has been raised by the customer of Support Document [ID 781860.1] on Metalink. The customer was told that this behaviour is hard coded and to contact Expert Services.

I dont know if there was a solution provided to the customer, because the document was never updated, but this defect would have problems passing User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

[Toggle Solution]

At first glance, an easy solution would be to hijack the method behind the X button, and invoke it from browser script, but since it is not a documented API, it should be a last resort.

TBUI can be invoked by Ctrl+Shift+Y , which fires a menu command and invokes a Business service to toggle the task pane.

function closeTBUIPane()
{
var BS = theApplication().GetService("Task UI Service (SWE)");
var inputs = theApplication().NewPropertySet();
var outputs = theApplication().NewPropertySet();
outputs = BS.InvokeMethod("ToggleTaskPane", inputs);
}

This would be the ideal solution.

The business service that we are interested in is "Task UI Service (SWE)", it has the following methods

Open,Close and Toggle

The Open,Toggle methods work fine, but the Close methods seems to be disabled. It seems like when Siebel first designed TBUI, they used seperate methods to open and close the task pane, but in the end Siebel replaced it with the Toggle method.

Although we can use Toggle to close the TBUI after the user clicks Submit, but if, on the chance that the user clicks the X button on the task pane in the middle of the task (therefore closing the pane) when the user reaches the end of the task, clicking the submit button to finish would activate the Toggle method and re-open the pane.

Unless we have someway of detecting if the task pane has been already closed and not perform the toggle, this method may not be acceptable. The only way i know of detecting the state of a pane is to check the existence of the frame by using unsupported browser methods, which takes us back to our first solution.

[X Button Solution]

The following line of browser allows us to tap into the method behind the X button, and invoke it from our TBUI applet.

top.SWEFindFrame(top,"SS_TaskUIPane").TaskObj().HandleClose();

Another problem that we'll face is the Next, and Submit buttons are actually the same physical button that call the same method, TBUI will dynamically change the label of the button depending on what view the task is on, which makes this a little trickier.

There are two solutions to this,

1. Make a clone the TBUI applet and use this clone exclusively for the Submit button and put it in the final view

2. Reuse the vanilla TBUI applet and use browser script to read the button text and decide wether or not to close the task pane

The use of undocumented browser methods is not something i would normally recommend, but until Siebel provides a proper fix, this workaround provides customers with a solution that would not cripple the system if the method becomes deprecated.

The worse that can happen is you revert back to the product defect, the upside is that your application dosnt confuse your users and passes UAT.

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