Impossible Siebel

Solution - Popup Applet "X" button

This is the long awaited solution to the Popup Applet X button challenge, which was solved by Master configurator Michael Feng.

[Background]

Siebel provides us with two events on popup applets, represented by the buttons "Ok" and "Cancel" which provides the neccessary hooks to capture most business requirements around closing of popup applets.

But the "X" button is an exception case, where the user forced closed the applet without completing the required interaction. In these cases, you might want to rollback any changes that were made since the applet was opened, or popup an alert to educate the user of the consequences of not closing the Applet properly.

[Siebel popup applets]

It is important to understand what happens when we click on the "X" on a popup applet in Siebel. The developer who requested help from the Oracle forums, tried attaching a custom method on window.onunload, which is a native browser event for when the current view has been navigated away from or closed.

This is the right line of thinking, and isnt far off from Michael Fengs solution below. This would normally work for traditional web apps, but Siebel dosnt close the popup applet when you click "X", it just minimizes it and hides it under your taskbar, which is why the window.unload event never fires.

The way to see this in action, is to set your taskbar to auto hide, watch what happens when you click "X" on a popup applet. You'll see it minimized to a short title bar on the bottom left of your screen, underneath where the taskbar would normally sit when displayed.

[Usability]

The reason why Siebel does this is for usability. When you log into your Siebel application, the first time you open any popup applet will always be the slowest, thats because Siebel has to spawn a new instance of an IE window. When you click "X", siebel will minimise and hide the window. The next time when you open another popup applet, Siebel will re-display and re-use this same popup window.

Re-displaying an existing window is in order or magnitudes faster than opening a brand new window, and greatly enhances the user experience in HI applications.

[Solution]

As mentioned in the original post, there are various solutions to this problem. When the popup applet is closed, focus will return back to the control/applet that invoked the popup applet, and you could, pop up a confirmation at this point, but it is ugly, if the popup applet is used in many places then you would have code on a lot of base applets.

Since the Popup applet is never closed, another idea is to set a looping timer to determine the position of the applet, and if it disappears below the taskbar then we know it has been closed. Its not a desirable solution as polling adds overhead. So the ideal solution is to trap the X event on the popup applet itself.

One alternative is to attach a custom function to the window.onmove event of the Popup applet which would give us a real time notification everytime the applet gets moved, and if it moves to the taskbar position, we know the user clicked X.

Or we could do better by detecting when the physical dimensions of the Popup applet has been shrunk by monitoring the window.onresize event.

Heres how it can be done, the following code is provided by courtesy of Michael Feng.

function Applet_Load () {
var oCon = this.FindActiveXControl("NewQuery");
var obody = oCon.document.body;
var odiv = oCon.document.createElement("script");
odiv.type = "text/javascript";
odiv.language = "javascript";
odiv.text = "window.onresize=UnloadTrigger;function UnloadTrigger(){if(document.body.clientHeight==0&&document.body.clientWidth==0){alert('You close the popup applet');}}";
obody.appendChild(odiv);
}

An interesting question is, what happens to the UnloadTrigger that is attached to our first popup window, when a second popup is called after the first? Does it still linger around, even when if its unwanted on the second window? Siebel re-renders the entire contents of the applet everytime it is "re-used", but keeps a cache of the last applet.

Base applet --> Popup Applet A --> Popup Applet B

Siebel will cache the contents of Popup Applet A when it is opened, Siebel re-uses the popup window, and renders the HTML for Popup applet B when it is opened.

When Popup Applet B is closed, Siebel will reuse the popup window, and restore Popup Applet A from its cache, therefore restoring our UnloadTrigger.

So we have to modify the solution to deal with the fact that popups can spawn other popups.

function Applet_Load () {
var oCon = this.FindActiveXControl("NewQuery");
var obody = oCon.document.body;
var odiv = oCon.document.createElement("script");
odiv.type = "text/javascript";
odiv.language = "javascript";
odiv.text = "window.onresize=UnloadTrigger;function UnloadTrigger(){if(document.body.clientHeight==0&&document.body.clientWidth==0&&!Top().SWEPopupGainFocus()){alert('You close the popup applet');}}";
obody.appendChild(odiv);
}

The above code uses and undocumented function Top().SWEPopupGainFocus() to determine if a popup is in focus or not. We only want to display a message when there is no popup open.

The last piece to this puzzle is to handle the positive events when the user click on "Ok" and "Cancel", in which event we do not want to display our message. You'll need to set profile attributes, or view variables to indicate that the applet was closed properly, and check for these variables in the unload function.

function Applet_Load () {
var oCon = this.FindActiveXControl("NewQuery");
var obody = oCon.document.body;
var odiv = oCon.document.createElement("script");
odiv.type = "text/javascript";
odiv.language = "javascript";
odiv.text = "window.onresize=UnloadTrigger;function UnloadTrigger(){if(document.body.clientHeight==0&&document.body.clientWidth==0&&!Top().SWEPopupGainFocus()&&App().GetProfileAttr('ProperlyClosed')!='Y'){alert('You close the popup applet');}}";
obody.appendChild(odiv);
}

Thanks to Michael for providing this solution, and for helping solve another impossible problem and breaking new grounds on creativity =).