Hi Monks,

I'm working on a project where I want to retrieve a 10 character string from an Outlook 2003 email, use that string to query Siebel to get the owner of a record, and then forward the email to the record owner. Right now the emails come to a common inbox and have to be manually looked up and forwarded.

At this point I'm focusing first on getting the record owner from Siebel because I think that'll be the biggest challenge and if I can't do that, then the whole project is moot anyway.

Our Siebel application(run by another department) is accessed via Internet Explorer and I've been using LWP in my first attempts. So far I can get logged in and get inital data back from Siebel.

The next task is to send the string to Siebel to get the record owner but I'm having a hard finding just what to send. When I look at a Wireshark trace on an inbound packet I see Javascript and some kind of packed data. On an outbound package I see the Siebel "commands" and more of the packed data. Here's a small example where I sent the string to Siebel to do a query.

POST /callcenter_enu/start.swe HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .N
+ET CLR 2.0.50727)
Host: server.example.com
Content-Length: 858
Cache-Control: no-cache
Cookie: _sn=BsAIEBL0skPPwZeZQNBgthL4ZV6rupIEFYdIiz5edxyE_


SWECLK=1&SWEField=s_2_1_5_0&SWER=0&SWESP=false&crpc=1&s_2_2_61_0
=&s_2_2_46_0=1-77263209&s_2_2_47_0=&s_2_2_72_0=&s_2_2_73_0=&s_2_2_53_0
=&s_2_2_48_0=&s_2_2_50_0=&s_2_2_54_0=&s_2_2_56_0=&s_2_2_59_0=&s_2_2_49
_0=&s_2_2_64_0=&s_2_2_65_0=&s_2_2_31_0=&s_2_2_66_0=&s_2_2_67_0=&s_2_2_
+69_
0=&s_2_2_35_0=&s_2_2_68_0=&s_2_2_34_0=&s_2_2_70_0=&s_2_2_71_0=&s_2_2_2
+9_
0=&s_2_2_55_0=&s_2_2_57_0=&s_2_2_60_0=&s_2_2_74_0=&s_2_2_76_0=&s_2_2_7
+7_
0=&s_2_2_75_0=&s_2_2_45_0=&s_2_2_33_0=&s_2_2_58_0=&s_2_2_30_0=&s_2_2_
42_0=&SWERPC=1&SWEC=9&SWEStrCCnt=335&SWEActiveApplet=Service+Request+
List+Applet&SWEActiveView=All+Service+Request+across+Organizations&
SWECmd=InvokeMethod&SWEVI=&SWEView=All+Service+Request+across+Organiza
+tions
&SWEApplet=Service+Request+List+Applet&SWEMethod=ExecuteQuery&SWERowId
+=1%2b1QQ
%2b1&SWEReqRowId=1&SWERowIds=&SWEP=&SWETS=1241540082386&SWSECancelID=1
+241540082
[download]

I don't know a whole lot about what the browser does to this data when sending or recieving except that an ActiveX control gets installed in the browser before I'm able to access the Siebel URL.

Given that the data being transferred back and forth between the browser and Siebel is not plain text, I'm wondering if I might be able to use COM/OLE instead? I've been trying to learn Perl as my first language and I've resisted an attempt at learning COM/OLE at the same time, but if that's the best way to accomplish this, then a small(hopefully) detour might be worth it. I've wondered too if I would be better to try and attempt this using some MS based tool. That's my last choice as my whole purpose of this project is not so much for the functionality it will provide but to learn Perl.

In the name of full disclosure, there's a node here CGI and Siebel databases from 2001 where another monk asked about accessing Siebel data and the response was to contact Siebel about various methods. That option is not open to me (unless Oracle/Siebel provides free support) because this is not a company sanctioned project(despite the fact that it will save them money). In fact I'm trying to stay under the radar until I've got something working and then I might have some influence in getting official support or have it maintained by IT.

Any input appreciated.
Thank-you.