Migrating Navigation Collections and Pagelets November 4, 2008
Posted by Tipster in PIA, PeopleTools.add a comment
Following on from yesterday’s post on creating and publishing a Navigation Collection, now you’ve created one you’ll want to migrate it around between environments. There are a few steps to this. (more…)
Save time with a Custom Navigation Collection and Pagelet November 3, 2008
Posted by Tipster in PIA, PeopleTools.5 comments
Frequently when I’m working I find that I’m visiting the same areas within the system regularly, so to make my life easier I’ll often create a Pagelet based on a custom Navigation Collection containing my often used components. This greatly reduces the number of clicks required for day-to-day work and could be really useful for end users.
NB: Nothing shown here requires the Enterprise Portal product.
An example can be seen here:
MonkeyGrease Plea July 16, 2008
Posted by Tipster in PIA, PeopleSoft, PeopleTools.3 comments
I’m going to be looking at MonkeyGrease over the next couple of weeks and wondered if anyone felt like sharing their experiences.
I’ll be setting it up in a VM and tinkering with it to see what it can do. As a result I’d love to see screenshots, descriptions or – if you’re feeling particularly generous – some code if you’ve used MonkeyGrease in the past. I’ll give full credit to anything used, and if you do send code I won’t use it on client site, purely for the purposes of demonstrating MonkeyGrease’s functionality.
I’m aware that others have blogged about this in the past, including Jim Marion, Rich Manalang and one of the Grey Sparling team, and there is a Google Group for it. If there is anything else out there I’d love to know. Once I’ve got all the info in I’ll post a consolidated write-up and include all the links.
For those new to MonkeyGrease, see here.
A Custom Message on the Signon Page (part 3) November 9, 2007
Posted by Tipster in Oracle, PIA, PeopleSoft.4 comments
A further solution to the ‘Message of the Day’ problem has presented itself which may or may not (depending upon the client’s requirements) be a neater solution.
This is quicker and cleaner to implement, but only works with IE. If your client uses Firefox this isn’t the answer for you!
A Custom Message on the Signon Page (part 2) November 6, 2007
Posted by Tipster in Oracle, PIA, PeopleSoft.4 comments
One of the criticisms that could be leveled at the previous post ‘A Custom Message on the Signon Page’ and its attempt to provide ‘Message of the Day’ functionality is that it’s static. If you need to change the message, you need to bounce the PIA. At some clients this would be fine – and at others not – so another solution was needed.
One way is to embed an iFrame in the signin.html page that points to the file containing the ‘Message of the Day’ text. The signin.html loads on PIA boot and knows it has an iFrame in it, but doesn’t look for the file until someone loads the page. Then you can change the text as often as you like without having to bounce the PIA. If the message text is longer than the box, a vertical scroll bar appears.
(This solution is better for mixed browser clients, however if you are Internet Explorer only consider this solution instead.)
A Custom Message on the Signon Page November 5, 2007
Posted by Tipster in Oracle, PIA, PeopleSoft.comments closed
A quick and easy one today. I was asked by a colleague how to have a custom message appear on the signon page. Partly out of curiosity and partly inspired by these posts (1 and 2) I thought I’d have a look.
As the signon page is (obviously) presented before signin, it’s not going to be a ‘PeopleCode and database’ kind of solution, but I wanted something neater than just hacking the HTML each time. It turns out that it’s simpler than I feared.
Counting characters in a field July 24, 2007
Posted by Tipster in PIA, PeopleSoft, PeopleTools.9 comments
I saw a query earlier today on the IT Toolbox messageboard where someone asked if there was a way to restrict a user to a certain number of letters or characters within a Long Edit box. The poster didn’t want to wait until the user tabs out of the field to tell them their text was too long.
I’d seen someone accessing the value of a field from JavaScript within an HTML Area before, and although I couldn’t find the post (I believe it was on SparkPath, but could be wrong) it set me thinking.
One solution (there may be better answers, but this was my submission) was as follows:
Outputing ALL images from PS July 12, 2007
Posted by Tipster in PIA, PeopleSoft, PeopleTools, SQL.6 comments
I was asked an unusual question yesterday and I thought I’d share it with you all.
The client wanted to view/extract all of the images held within PeopleSoft. My first reaction was that it couldn’t be done. As there are over 1000 images it’s not a task to be easily done manually. Also, only about 1/4 of the images are stored in the Web Server cache, so it’s not a task of just getting them from there.
So … how was it done?
Auto Login to PeopleSoft and App Designer July 4, 2007
Posted by Tipster in PIA, PeopleSoft, PeopleTools.6 comments
You can set up shortcuts to auto-logon to the PeopleSoft PIA and/or App Designer.
I’m still in two minds whether to add this post or not, but there are some circumstances where this can save you a bit of time and I’m sure you’ll know when and where that is – for example, on a single user VM, or in a DEMO environment, or even in a DEV environment if it’s a small team. It’s no different to having single sign-on enabled for PIA logon anyway. It shouldn’t need stating that these shortcuts should never be used in any environments where security is important, and under no circumstances anywhere near a Production environment!
App Designer:
Create a new shortcut and adapt the following line for your environment:
<pshome>\bin\client\winx86\pside.exe -CT <dbtype> -CD <dbname> -CO <oprid> -CP <pwd>
eg.
D:\pshome\bin\client\winx86\pside.exe -CT ORACLE -CD HR9DMO -CO PS -CP PS
It may help to alter the properties of the shortcut to run it maximised window, just to save clicking each time …
PeopleSoft PIA
The following works for some tools versions and not others. I’m sure it has worked in Tools 8.4x, but it doesn’t seem to work on Tools 8.48. If you get this working, let me know your Tools version and we’ll see if we can work out when they put a stop to it, or if it works for you in Tools8.48 what I’m doing wrong.
http://<web-server>/psp/<site>/?cmd=login &userid=<userid>&pwd=<pwd>&disconnect=y
eg.
http://hrdmo/psp/HR9DMO/?cmd=login &userid=PS&pwd=PS&disconnect=y
Remove line breaks from URLs when pasting. I don’t know what the ‘disconnect=y’ does.
Using the PIA Welcome Message June 13, 2007
Posted by Tipster in Administration, PIA, PeopleSoft, SQL.25 comments
The PIA Welcome message, or Portal Greeting is a pretty simple piece of functionality, but I’ve not seen it used on a single client site. For those that haven’t seen it before, it looks like this:
The welcome message is stored on a per user basis, it is set using the ‘Personalize Content’ link on the Homepage, and it is stored in the table PSPRUHDEFN. If updated via SQL, it won’t appear instantly unless you either bounce the App Server (and clear the cache) or increment the versions in PSVERSION and PSLOCK. There is an (Oracle) sql script to update the message – so it appears instantly – at the foot of this post.
A more constructive use of the greeting would be to alter it slightly. Particularly during development and testing it would be useful to display the logged on user and the environment name. An extremely simple change to a Tools object (yes, I know, but it’s such a small change that the upgrade implications will be minimal) allows this.
There are two steps, output the user/database in the greeting and make the message appear on every page, not just the Homepage.
