Self Service at Pret – Technical Details September 7, 2011
Posted by Duncan in Look and Feel, PeopleTools, PIA, Strategy.comments closed
I posted a video yesterday showing some of the work we’d done at Pret and thought I’d add a little more technical detail and some clearer screenshots. (more…)
Portal Greeting on Tools 8.50 May 21, 2010
Posted by Duncan in Look and Feel, PeopleTools 8.50, PIA.comments closed
I’ve posted before about using the Portal Greeting / PIA Welcome message to display something useful here. I’ve recently come to implement this on a client and discovered that the method I suggested no longer works for Tools 8.50.
Pleasingly, it’s now actually slightly easier to achieve (and will appear on all pages, not just the Home Page).
Open up App Package PT_BRANDING, the Class BrandingBase and search for the string ‘add &addjs’. Immediately preceding that line, add the following line of code:
&greeting = "User: " | %UserId | " on Database: " | %DbName;
(Plus some comments identifying the customisation etc.)
This will do the trick, but the end result looks a bit big and blocky. It’s a piece of cake to alter the greeting style to achieve a much better looking result.
Open the PSHOMEPAGE Freeform Style Sheet, locate the greeting style class and replace it with this:
.greeting {
color: #FFFFFF;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 10pt;
margin: 0 0 0 70px;
line-height: 24pt;
}
The end result will look something like this (I’ve also added bold tags around the UserID and Database for clarity):
Hide the ‘Windows 7 is not supported’ message January 27, 2010
Posted by Duncan in PeopleTools 8.50, PIA, Windows.comments closed
If you’ve been using the latest version of PeopleTools with any version of Windows 7 (which is becoming more prevalent) then you’ll have seen this error message many times:
Now I’m all for being warned if I’m doing something unsupported and I know Windows 7 isn’t supported yet, but probably will be in the near future. I’m not going to swap my client OS just to keep the PIA happy, but I don’t want to be warned every single time. Also, it’s not a very well formatted error message as it throws out the alignment of the logon screen and it just looks a little messy.
I wasn’t going to do anything about my niggly annoyance until someone else wondered how to remove it then it piqued my curiosity.
As far as I could see there are two ways to fix this, find a way of adding Windows 7 to the supported OSes, or hide the warning message.
I tried many variations of OS codes in the browser.xml file as that appears to be where the supported OSes are read from (the sharper eyed among you may have noticed that I’ve added Windows 7 to the list in the above screenshot). This had no effect however, so I admitted defeat in trying to fix the cause and resigned myself to just trying to hide the symptom.
The HTML behind the signon page is ‘signin.html’ within ‘<PIA_HOME>\webserv\<domain>\applications\<site>\PORTAL.war\WEB-INF\psftdocs\<node>’. We can’t just comment out the error sections as we only want to hide this specific error message, other errors like ‘invalid password’ we still want to see.
The first step is to hide the browser error message. Search for ‘id=”browsercheck_error”‘ and you’ll see this section. Comment out as shown.
<div style="text-align:center">
<h1 id="error_img" style="display:none"><a id ="error_link" href="javascript:setFocus();" tabindex="1"><img src="<%=psCtxPath%><%=psHome%>/images/PT_LOGIN_ERROR.gif" alt="<%=130%>" border="0"/></a></h1>
<h2 id="login_error"> <%=error%> </h2>
<h2 id="discovery_error"> <%=ps.discovery.error%> </h2>
<!--<h2 id="browsercheck_error" style="text-align:left"> <%=browserCheck%> </h2>-->
</div>
This prevents the text from showing, however we also want to prevent the warning image being displayed for this warning also.
Search for ‘setErrorImg’ and you’ll see this function. Comment as shown and add the line below.
function setErrorImg()
{
var login_error = document.getElementById('login_error').innerHTML;
var discovery_error = document.getElementById('discovery_error').innerHTML;
/*var browsercheck_error = document.getElementById('browsercheck_error').innerHTML;*/
var browsercheck_error = "";
login_error = login_error.replace(/^\s+/,""); // delete leading spaces
discovery_error = discovery_error.replace(/^\s+/,"");
browsercheck_error = browsercheck_error.replace(/^\s+/,"");
if (login_error.length != 0 || discovery_error.length != 0 || browsercheck_error.length != 0)
{
document.getElementById('error_img').style.display = 'block';
document.getElementById('error_link').focus();
}
else
setFocus();
}
Bounce your PIA and now the message won’t be displayed when you use Windows 7, however other error messages will still appear as desired.
Note: Updated 27th Jan after Jim Marion’s suggestion below on my incorrect commenting syntax.
Migrating Navigation Collections and Pagelets November 4, 2008
Posted by Duncan in PeopleTools, PIA.comments closed
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 Duncan in PeopleTools, PIA.comments closed
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 Duncan in PeopleSoft, PeopleTools, PIA.comments closed
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 Duncan in Oracle, PeopleSoft, PIA.comments closed
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 Duncan in Oracle, PeopleSoft, PIA.comments closed
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 Duncan in Oracle, PeopleSoft, PIA.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 Duncan in PeopleSoft, PeopleTools, PIA.comments closed
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:
The PeopleSoft Tipster Blog 