Making an MVF Required

If you were to do a google search for this requirement you would probably find a lot of posts returned so I do not want to claim I am doing anything new. In fact, My Oracle Support even has a post about doing this declaratively and they claim this has been added to bookshelf for 8.x as the documentation defect is shown to be fixed but I cannot find the relevant page. (Search for Document ID ID 476071.1). Anyway I just wanted to put all this information in one place for my own reference and for anyone else that finds this useful.

First, the configuration:

The key thing here is that since the calculated field name has the same name as the MVF with just a space added, the message displayed to the user will be the same as well. Next, the appearance:

To make the red asterisk appear, add the following text to the Applet Control Caption - String Override whereever in the string you need the asterisk:

<img src="images/icon_req.gif" alt="Code Validated field" border="0" space="0" hspace="0">

Keep in mind Siebel automatically adds the colon (:) after the field label so that in Siebel 8.x, the red asterisk will appear before the colon while other required fields will have the asterisk appear after the colon. If you wish to be even more precise, and don't we all, you can remove the field label Siebel creates for you all together and create your own so you can place the colon where you wish. This is described in Document 852952.1 on My Oracle Support in a pretty superfluosly wordy way, so here is the excerpted nickel version:

1. First remove the existing Field Label of HTML type Text.
2. Drag a drop a Control of Type Label in the Grid Layout Applet web template
3. Set the Caption for this Label Control. To show for example,

Last Name: *

Enter the following in the Caption - String Override:

Last Name:<img src="images/icon_req.gif" alt="Code Validated field" border="0" space="0" hspace="0">

Set the property HTML Type = Label

As for making the asterisk conditionally appear (for instance to support the BC level functionality enforced by the calculated field in the Required Field User Property), there is not really a way to do that, but a close approximation if you only have one is to use toggle applets which toggle on the same conditional value that the fields user property is based on.