Using Siebel Open UI

Siebel Open UI is an open architecture which renders everything in HTML and makes it easier for you to customize the user interface. Pega Robotic Automation includes support for Seibel Open UI. For more information, see the Application Support Matrix.

Pega Robotic Automation supports Open UI as a Siebel application, the same way that Siebel High Interactivity (HI) is supported. Almost the same level of automation is provided (exceptions are listed later in this topic). If you already have Siebel HI solutions, you will need to re-create those solutions to approximate the same level of automation. An automated conversion utility can help you transition from Siebel HI. For more information, see Converting Siebel HI Projects into Open UI Projects.

Note: To request a copy of the conversion utility, contact your Pega Robotic Automation support representative.

Unlike Siebel HI, Open UI runs inside a single top level document and uses HTML elements to render the layout. It also makes heavy use of JavaScript to model the various layers and handle object rendering. The Open UI matching and automation experience is similar to using Studio with Siebel HI. A Siebel page contains several major components:

Application menu
Toolbar
Screen navigation
View

Of these, Studio provides automation capabilities for Screen navigation and the View and its child components.

Screen navigation

This control basically divides the page in half, horizontally. It contains one or more rows of tabs that let the user navigate to different views. The top row navigates to the home page for a major functional unit within the application, such as Contacts or Opportunities. The second row navigates to views within the selected major unit. The Screen Navigation control is implemented in the layout with a DIV element (and child elements) that has the ID: 's_sctrl'. This element is created when the page is loaded and remains in place for the lifetime of the document.

View

The View sits under the Screen Navigation component and contains the main functionality of the application. There are several types of component in a view:

Applets - Groupings of controls that perform a particular job. On a typical 'list'-type view, there will be two applets - a list (data grid) on the top half and an edit form on the bottom half.
List applets - List applets are a special type of applet. This is an applet has an embedded data grid that is used to show query results. It also serves as a way to inline-edit rows of data. Studio provides a rich set of support for List applets. See the list translator for more details.
Applet controls - Applet controls are user-input controls that exist inside applets. These include text boxes, combo boxes, multi-value controls, and others. Pega Robotic Automation supports the following types of applet controls in Open UI:
- Checkbox
- Combobox
- Currency
- DateTime
- Mvg (multi-value)
- Number
- Picklist
- Text
- TextArea
Visibility navigation - This control that renders as a combo box and is generally found in a list applet. It contains all the child views within the current major group, such as Contacts, Opportunities, and so on.
Detail navigation - This is a tab-based navigation control, similar to the Screen navigation control, but is a child of the View.

Note: Other types are not supported by Pega Robotic Automation.

The View control is implemented in the layout with a DIV element (and many layers of child elements) that has this ID: '_sweview'. This element is created when the page is loaded and remains in place for the lifetime of the document.

Enabling Seibel Open UI

Use the AllowSeibelOpenUi setting in the StudioConfig.xml file to enable or disable the SiebelOpenUIFactory. This setting is in the app settings section:

If you enter True, you must also delete the TargetFactoryConfigurationCache.xml file. You will find this file in the folder specified in the ConfigurationLocation setting in the CommonConfig.xml file. The default is False.

Note: This setting only determines whether the factory is added to the adapter at interrogation time. If the factory is already part of the adapter, it will not be removed if you enter False.

You must close and restart Studio for this setting to take effect. Studio’s Seibel UI support includes support for Internet Explorer versions 10 and 11.

Selecting an adapter

As with Siebel HI, no special adapter is required. Typically, a web adapter is used. All functionality for Open UI was added to OpenSpan.Adapters.Siebel, OpenSpan.Adapters.Siebel.Design and OpenSpan.Adapters.Web.

Files to inject

Because Open UI functionality is completely driven by JavaScript, there are no additional modules to inject. In fact, it overrides the base to prevent OpenSpan.Native.IPC from being injected, to avoid any unnecessary dependencies.

Using the SiebelOpenUIControlApplet match rule

Support for Open UI also includes the SiebelOpenUIControlApplet match rule. This rule matches on the name of the applet that contains the control.