Enable Script Assist
Siebel 7.7.2.3 and 7.8.2 introduced a new eScript engine called the ST eScript engine. The engine supports strong typing, which offers performance improvements at the cost of offending some weak-typing-fundamentalists. Even without rewriting script to define your variables, the new engine is supposed to offer performance and scalability advantages over the old T-eScript engine.
More importantly for the day-to-day life of a hard-coding Siebel developer, the new engine (finally!) offers method listing (known elsewhere as ‘typedown’). This is the feature common to all modern IDEs that pops up a list of child methods of a known-type object, so that the poor developer doesn’t have to remember the precise format of ‘PropertySet.InsertChildAt’. One of those little modern innovations that lets developers get on with concentrating on the flow of their script, rather than the irrelevancies of syntax. Now, Siebel’s implementation is hardly Visual Studio IntelliSense, but it’s useful nonetheless.
To switch on method listing, go to View > Options in Tools, then the Scripting tab, and tick the ‘Enable Method Listing’ checkbox: the associated IDE-improvements ‘Enable Auto Complete’, ‘Enable Warnings’ and ‘Deduce Types’ are also worth having. If you can set all these flags then you’re good to go.
If these settings are all disabled, then you’re not using ST eScript engine. This is an enterprise-wide setting that you might have to sell. Details of the whys and hows are on SupportWeb. In brief: for 7.8 & 8, set the System Preference ‘Enable ST Script Engine’ to TRUE, for 7.7.2.4, change your cfg file to set EnableCLIScripting to TRUE.
5 comments July 4th, 2007