Quick Fill - Requirement

One of the lesser known features of Siebel CRM (it came with version 7.7) is Quick Fill. It manifests itself in many of the standard form applets such as the Service Request Detail Applet.

When you open the applet menu, you can see the typical group of four commands.

With the Save as Template command we can save the current record as a Quick Fill Template. These templates are private by default (just as predefined queries are) and can be made public by anyone who has access to the Quick Fill Templates Administration View in the Administration - Application screen.

When an end user chooses the New From Template command, a pick applet opens and displays all available templates. The end users selects one and the data from the template is inserted in a new record. The Apply Template command works in a similar way but updates the existing record instead of creating a new one.

Power users can leverage the CTRL+J keyboard shortcut (New From Last Template) which creates a new record with data from the last used template.

So you want this on your form applet?

It is as simple as creating four new Applet Method Menu Items as described here.

However, I would recommend to use the Compare Objects window to simply copy them over from, say, the Service Request Detail Applet.


It comes rather unexpected, but this is it. Simply copy over the four menu items and compile the applet.

Quick Fill under the hood

When a template is saved, the data is taken from the form applet and copied to the template. This includes all non-empty single value fields. The HTML Sequence property of the applet's controls (aka tab order) specifies the sequence in which the data will be applied to a new or existing record.

We can prevent the copy effect for individual fields which will be different for each record (such as Account etc.) by using the BusComp User Property "Quick Fill Excluded Field: FieldName" on the applet's business component. A field name must be provided after the colon and the value should be set to Y.

Have a nice day

@lex