Siebel Code Challenge – #11

UPDATED: An easy one, I guess – well done to Ranjith and Rahul for spotting the mistake. Although Oracle uses a percentage sign (%) as a wildcard character, Siebel uses an asterisk (*). As such, the SQL that get generated for the query below will actually check for a literal ‘%’ as part of the string. Personally, I know of very few Mr and Mrs Smit%!

A real doozy today! We came across this when debugging an incident – see if you can spot the mistake in the following eScript:

function CodeChallenge11()
{
  // Declare variables
  var boContact, bcContact;
  var numContact = 0;

  try
  {
    // Instantiate new BC instance
    boContact = TheApplication().GetBusObject("Contact");
    bcContact = boContact.GetBusComp("Contact");

    with (bcContact)
    {
      // Create query context
      ClearToQuery();
      SetViewMode(AllView);
      SetSearchSpec("Last Name", "Smit%");
      ExecuteQuery(ForwardOnly);

      numContact = CountRecords();

      return numContact;
    }
  }
  catch(e)
  {
    // Call the custom LogError function to write error to error log
    LogError("Woops, an error has occurred!");
    return(-1);
  }
  finally
  {
    // Destroy objects
    bcContact = null;
    boContact = null;
  }
}

As usual, please add your comments below. No prize this time – I have a family to feed you know.