Why can't I see that View???

There are times when troubleshooting an issue, that you start searching Oracle support and you find a ticket that has your problem, but the solution does not apply, and then you keep looking and you find another one that looked in a different direction yet still, the solution did not apply. And you think, I wish there was a single place that listed all the reasons that this could happen. Siebel does do this sometimes a handful of their generic error messages, listing ten different reasons you could be getting that message. Well I am going to apply that format to some basic configuration items.

The first one is View Visibility. So without further ado, here is a list of reasons you may not see a particular view in the GUI (Please feel free to add additional reasons in comments):

1. The basics: View has been created in Tools, compiled into the SRF, and the GUI you are looking at matches the SRF you compiled the view into. I know this part should be obvious, but we are aiming at completeness
2. The View needs to be added to a screen. Make sure the View attribute spelling matches the spelling of the View object. Check the Display In Page unless you want this to be hidden, and probably the Display In Site Map. These default to True.
3. The View exists in the GUI meta data. Administration - Application -> Views. Again make sure the spelling matches the repository object
4. The View has been added to a responsibility that your user login has access to
5. The Responsibility Cache has been cleared. Doh!
6. Log Out and Log Back In (Views are not immediately visible in the session where it was added)

Ok those are the basics. Now for the advanced:

1. Navigate to the Application - Administration -> Responsibilities -> Tab Layout view. Check the responsibility which is primary for your user login in the top applet. Query for the Application you are logged into in the middle applet. Find the Screen you have placed the view under in the third applet, and in the fourth applet, insure the Hide flag is not checked. This is more applicable for trying to figure out why a vanilla view is not exposed
2. Navigate to the Application - Personalization -> Views view. Query for the view which is you are having issues with. Review the Condition Expression. This expression should either be null, or should evaluate to true for the logged in user. The date range should either be null or should include today's date in its range.
   
3. Last but not least, it may be a license key issue. Siebel implement license keys through their views. One way to test whether this is the issue*** is to copy the view, add the copied view to a responsibility, add the copied view to the View admin and to a responsibility and clear the cache, log out and back in. If you can see the view now, then you need to get the license key. Not all license keys indicate additional purchases. There are a couple of instances I have found where a view just dropped out of the standard set as a defect and the fix was to provide a license key to get it back (Remote System Preferences view is an example I ran into in 8.o)

Some Additional Pointers:

• Always copy and paste view names between objects or between Tools and the UI to avoid spelling errors, as they are one of the most common problems in this area.
• Avoid the use of apostrophes to indicate possesive as this will often cause issues down the road. (I know siebel has some vanilla instances where theu use it with ...Manager's... but trust me, avoid this).
• When copying views, insure the Thread and Visibility applets are actually present as View Web Template Items for that view. No error is thown to the UI if they do not match, but buried in the Siebel.log, you will find them. They manifest by not executing the correct search when navigating across views. For instance if you are on an All view and navigate to the correlated My view, but one that has an invalid applet, the view will appear to change in the UI, but the data does not, so the My view will show All view data.

*** This should be done just to test that the license key is the issue. A copied view really should not go into production as this is a slippery slope which is really not a good idea in the long term (and its against the license agreement too)

UPDATE: Dos, in comments, points out a better way to see if Licensing (or some other problem) is at issue. Just paste the following into your URL after the start.swe? replacing the view name in bold with the view you are having problems with:

SWECmd=GotoView&SWEView=Quote+List+View

You need to replace a space with a +. Since 'Quote List View' is part of the Orders module requiring a specific license key, you get the following message if you do not have the key:

View 'Quote List View' is not licensed for this site.(SBL-DAT-00327)