Grouper Developers Forum

[Tom Barton <>]

Many thanks Joy. Based on your experience, do you have any suggestions 
for how the process could either be (1) easier or (2) less dependent on 
the default UI (I'm thinking of those 5 files to be edited, but maybe 
else ...)?

Tom

Joy Veronneau wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I promised some comments on my experience customizing the grouper UI  
> for Cornell so here they are.  I've attached an image of how the  
> grouper help page looks with our customizations.
>
> Our web group at Cornell provided me with style sheets and sample  
> templates which were easily integrated following Gary's  instructions.  
> I haven't fine tuned things yet, there are a few  things missing from 
> our style sheets that I need to define - you will  notice the font that 
> "Login" is written with in the screen shot  example is a little small, 
> for example.
>
> I used the Eclipse development environment  (with which I was only  
> somewhat familiar) with the myEclipse add-on and haven't had previous  
> experience with struts and tiles, so I was no expert going in to  
> this... which I think since I was able to get this far means that  
> things are well organized and documented :)
>
> I worked with the grouper-ui (0.6) version, as opposed to the grouper- 
> qs version, building a war file and deploying under Tomcat 5.5.7.
>
> I created a directory called "cornell" under the "webapp" directory  and 
> put all my style sheets and customizations there.  I copied  several 
> grouper templates, such as "footer.jsp", "header.jsp",  "template.jsp" 
> to this directory and renamed them "cornellFooter.jsp"  and so forth.  
> Then I created an additional build file which is  called from the main 
> build file after you edit the build.properties  file.   I also created a 
> tiles-def-cornell.xml file.
>
> It seemed necessary to disable the grouper.css and signet.css styles  in 
> head.jsp (actually cornellHead.jsp) (not sure if that was the  correct 
> way to disable these stylesheets) because my templates didn't  have some 
> of the definitions for buttons and headers that those files  do, and I 
> was getting some blue tones mixed in with the red which was  not pretty 
> :)  After commenting out those two style sheets, the page  picked up the 
> defaults for the headers and buttons which was a little  prettier.  I 
> suppose the other option would be to redefine those  items in my own 
> style sheets.
>
> Gary and I exchanged some email about some questions I had defining  the 
> tabs "My Memberships", "My Groups", etc across the top - he  mentioned 
> that he had some ideas for improving this in the next release.
>
> One question is how easy it will be to port the customization from  
> release to release.  It seems that there are less than five files  that 
> need to be edited outside of the "cornell" directory  (web.core.xml, 
> build.properties, etc.) and then I will want to  compare the jsp 
> templates I have copied for Cornell with the new  versions to check for 
> any new functionality that I might want to  incorporate.  So I'm 
> thinking it's not too much trouble.  Any other  comments/ideas on this?
>
> Hopefully, this is the information you were looking for when you  asked 
> for my comments :)  Feel free to write with questions etc.
>
> Joy
>
>
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