Dovetail Software Blogs

In previous posts, we've covered the basics of Seeker, along with searching custom attributes of an object (such as case.x_notes). Continuing on, lets look at how to index and search custom objects. In our environment, we keep track of the software license keys that we send to our customers, and we do this in our Dovetail system. This is an ...

John Resig (creator of jQuery) recently posted a bunch of his presentations online, focused on JavaScript and jQuery. Check 'em out. I'm fast becoming a huge fan of jQuery, and we're now using it a lot more within Dovetail Agent. Not only is the library itself cool - but the plethora of available plugins really make it rock.

Many customers use hierarchical (multi-level) drop-down lists in their Clarify/Dovetail implementations. So, when one level of a select list changes, the down-level lists change as well. Clarify allows up 5 levels for a list. As an example, in baseline Clarify, there's a list titled CR_DESC that is a three level list for CPU, Operating System, ...

While working with a customer this week, they asked about automatic subcase creation, similar to Clarify's Task Manager module. For example, if a new case of type "New Employee" is created, then I want to automatically create 3 subcases: One subcase for setting up network accounts, dispatched to the network queue One subcase ...

Over the last couple of years, a number of very useful JavaScript libraries and frameworks have been introduced that make it tremendously easier to build rich web applications. A few of the more popular ones: Prototype Script.aculo.us MooTools These frameworks allow developers to easily write very rich, cross-browser web applications. I've ...

One of the common tasks for a support/call center manager is making sure the team is living up to its service level agreements (SLAs). Pretty much every customer I've ever dealt with has different SLAs. As you can imagine, there's a zillion ways for companies to setup and track their SLAs. Example SLAs: All cases must be responded to within ...

Clarify employs a strict ownership paradigm with its application, meaning that only the owner of a workflow object can make a critical change to it. This ownership paradigm was baked into the product, and difficult to modify. For example, anyone can add notes to a case, but only the owner can change the status. What's a critical change? Let's ...

We use a client-side JavaScript object for creating tabs in our web applications. Unlike in the Clarify Classic Client, tabs in our web apps are the same page as the parent. When you click on a tab, you are actually displaying the HTML elements on that tab, and hiding the HTML elements on the other unselected tabs. It's all a bunch of Dynamic ...

Years ago, if I wanted to ''script'' Clarify, I would use UNIX shell scripts, including UNIX mini languages such as sed and awk, that would create dat files that could be imported with dataex. When ClearBasic was introduced, we also got cbbatch, which was a command line interpreter for ClearBasic, so we could script Clarify using CB. When we ...

For years, Clarify has used the full-text search engine from Fulcrum (now Hummingbird OpenText) to allow full text searches in its applications. This was important back in the day, since the database vendors didn't offer good solutions to this problem. Now they do. A couple years ago, as we started expanding our knowledgebase, we had the need to ...