Cornelius' Applet Set Focus Challenge

This article continues on from the guest article on Siebel Essentials - Set Focus on an Applet by Cornelius.

When I read the article by Cornelius, and saw the ~85 lines of code, I fainted (possibly due to the heat wave on the day) and when I came to, I wondered if this solution can be made leaner?

Querying the repository is sometimes necessary, when you need to achieve non-standard functionality, but in this case I felt there had to be a better way. Using SWEApplets only works in SI, but in HI, it should be possible to read the DOM and find the first visible applet and pass it to HandleAppletClick.

I did a quick POC using the IE DTB, and got a working solution with 5 lines of code. But 5 lines was too much in my opinion, so with a re-think of the problem, I by passed HandleAppletClick, and got the solution leaner.

The result is 3 lines of code. Heres how I did it.

Before we jump into the solution, ensure you have jQuery installed on your top object. This can be done via the web templates

Insert the following line of code in a common template such as your PageContainer

<script src="<your scripts folder>jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="<your scripts folder>common_1.00.js"></script>

Next assign the jQuery object to your top object as so in your common JS file
top.$=$;

Now you'll have access to this magic everywhere in your application.

[Solution]

Cornelius separated his solution into two parts

1. Setting focus on the applet using "HandleAppletClick"
2. Using Browser/Server script to retrieve the applet sequence from the repository

This solutions just entails 1 part

1. Goto the DOM behind the current view and click the first applet that we find =)

Line 1:

var iRows = top.$("frameset",top.SWEFindFrame(top,"_sweview").document).attr("rows");

The Siebel thin client has an array of 10 cached view frames, and randomly picks a frame to render the next view upon Application Navigate. This happens behind the scenes and is not exposed or documented. Although the frame reference is random, and the next view frame is not known, we can check to see which of the current 10 frames is visible through the "rows" attribute on the frame container.

The above line just returns a reference to the current frame index.

Line 2:

var fDoc = top.SWEFindFrame(top,"_svf"+top.$.inArray("*",iRows.split(","))).document;

With the frame index, we can grab a hold of the actual frame document, using "top.SWEFindFrame". This is an undocumented Siebel browser framework function, if you are uncomfortable using it, you can roll your own, just write a recursive function that iterates through the frames and match on the frame name or just copy the Siebel function into your own library.

Line 3:

top.$("div[onclick*='HandleAppletClick']",fDoc).first().click();

As Cornelius has discovered, Siebel uses a function called "HandleAppletClick" on the onclick handlers for its applets. My original 5 line solution involved scraping the Applet name from the DOM, and passing it to "HandleAppletClick". In this solution, I just look for the first element that has the onclick handler that fires "HandleAppletClick", and click it programmatically.

[Conclusion]

Although its not necessary to use jQuery, having it makes our solution more concise, and readable. A similiar browser script function could have been implemented, but you would be spending a lot of time performing the low level DOM work.

Applet Toggles, Personalization, and Display Visibility all affect the run time visibility of the Applet. This technique allows us to determine dynamic UI behaviour that is not available when querying the repository.

The solution is lightweight, fast and best of all, we performed a beat down of ~85 lines of browser/server script with 3 lines of "Black Magic Do" (Translation: Way of the black magic). For the non initiated, in martial arts Do, means way or road =)

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