July 09, 2016

How to add delay in Siebel eScript/Workflow?

Disclaimer: Ideally you should never have to create delay in Siebel, you must be doing something absolutely wrong or something amazingly innovative if you have to add delay in Siebel script or Siebel workflows.
How to add some delay in Siebel Script?

Let's assume for some(god forbid) reason you need to create delay of some seconds in Siebel escript or workflow, then how will you do it? 

Siebel provides sleep step in workflows that can be used to create delay for interactive workflows, but there is no way (documented) to create delay for service workflows or in scripts. Let's see what workarounds do we have.

Solution 1: User operating system timeout in script. 

Siebel can invoke operating system commands by Clib.system function, these functions wait till time command is successfully completed by operating system. 
Clib.System("timeout 2"); // Two second delay in windows hosted environment

or 
Clib.system("sleep 2"); // Two second Linux hosted environment.

This instruction will call operating system timeout command to create delay and Siebel will wait for command to finish and only after the specified time Siebel will continue with rest of the code. 

Solution 2:  Use EAI File Transport service to read an non existent file and with FileSleepTime parameter to create delay.

This will cause Siebel to wait for file for at least time specified before timing out, an then proceed with workflow. Make sure you use exception branch in for this step to proceed.

Solution 3:  Use asynchronous server request business service to execute subprocess at specified time in future. 
This solution doesn't garuntee the execution on that time, but works perfectly fine incase there is some degree of tolerance.

4 comments :

  1. Good one, but what about the Workflow Wait step? *ducks*

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice Post. Another OOTB approach.

    Calling a shared library or shared object.

    Unix:
    SElib.dynamicLink("libc.so", "sleep", )

    ReplyDelete
  3. BS Workflow Utilities have a special function Sleep with to parameters: MeasureUnit and duration

    ReplyDelete