Serialization - Sequence Generation

Christmas has arrived a week early for us. Generating records in numeric sequence numbers can be a burning requirement in any application but not when you are working with siebel.

Just when holidays were approaching and party mood was about take helm, we were asked to generate the payment requests associated with service request in sequence numbers (as third party system required that..no choice had to do it) . The first thought that struck was the usage of * Line Number (Sequence) BC based on the class CSSSequence. However the issue was for each Parent SR first payment notice starts from 1 as payment being child entity and the requirement was that sequence should start from 1000 and should be auto generated for every new record irrespective of Parent SR.

Fear of ending new year eve in office can do wonders and suddenly we found that this requirement could be fulfilled using "Serialization" instead of writing a script. This technique is extensively used for generating Case Serial Number/Claim Serial Numbers based on the region or year. We found it useful in our case. Mother of all siebel guides "Siebel Bookshelf" gives comprehensive details of configuring any custom BC to enable Serialization.
However, we had to run a minor update in order to start the sequence number from 1000. We created a new custom column "PAY_SEQ_NUM" in "S_CASE_SEQ_CTR" table and a custom field "Pay counter" which is used for sequencing in PUB counter business component for holding the sequence number. In order to start the sequence number from 1000 instead of 1 this field should pre-default with 1000. So that sequencing starts from 1000. There is also cool business service "PUB Case Serialization Service" which auto generates next sequence number in line.

PS: In order to have Serialization functionality available, make sure you are working on SIA version and you have access to Administration - Case view.

Happy Serialization!!