Siebel List of Values - A Strategic Move!

List of Values (LOV) is assumed to pretty simple entity in siebel and having very limited use, of showing values in dropdown picklist. But lately I found they can be used in more than one ways. They can be a real life saver. One use I have found of them is to avoid hard coding. Yes, you can avoid hard coding of values and use LOV instead which you can then change without SRF Release.

I will list below some real scenarios which I have come across and used List of Values to accomplish task which otherwise would have a real pain while moving stuff different environments.

Workflows - Requirement :
We were creating workflows that were going to integrate Siebel with some other application with the help of MQ Series. Now, to accomplish that we had to enter two paramerters related to MQ Series in the first step of workflows, Queue Manager and Physical Queue Name.
If, we were to hardcode then it would be difficult to move workflow between different envoirnments such as QA and production because they had different Physical Queue Name . There LOV's came to our Rescue. We created two LOV's with the values of the Queue Manager and Queue Name and used LookupValue() method in workflows to acomplish that.

LookupValue method accepts two arguments 'LOV Type' and Language Independent Code ('LIC') and returns the display value of that LOV Type. The syntax is as following

LookupValue("LOV Type","LIC")

Example :

• Create an new LOV Type (in this case we are created MQ_PHY_QUEUE_NAME. It should be same in all the environments where you want to deploy the workflow)
• Enter the Display Value (actual value that you want to speficy like in this case we specify ESBLDAS for dev env and ESBLQAS for QA Env)
• Enter the LIC (can be anything descriptive like in this case we had given 'Physical Queue Name')
• In the Input Arguments of workflow choose input argument type as Expression and specify the value as LookupValue("MQ_PHY_QUEUE_NAME","Physical Queue Name")

Now, it is going to pick the value as 'Display Value' of the LOV that you have specified.

In next post I will describe how can we use LOV to dynamically specify Required Fields for a Business Component.

For other posts Related to LOV please go through the category of List of Values