Grouper Developers Forum

["GW Brown, Information Systems and Computing" <>]

Thanks for the feedback Joy. I've added comments below.

Gary

--On 18 November 2005 16:32 -0500 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.
I envisaged that sites would 're-define' styles in their own stylesheet. It 
ought to be possible to override any behaviours that come with Grouper in 
this way, however, I can see that this can be quite challenging depending 
on the level of CSS experience. Based on this I will make some changes:

1)Have a configuration setting to 'remove' the signet and grouper css files
2)Allow a list of site-defined CSS files to be added. This would allow for 
more flexibility - keeping the usual site CSS 'pristine' whilst allowing 
other changes to be incorporated in separate files
3)I will rework template.jsp to insert a body.jsp which controls content 
between the HTML body tags. This should reduce the need to modify 
template.jsp.

BTW Firefox has various plugins which allow you to see where different 
style elements are inherited from.

> 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.
Currently menu items are 'hard-coded'. I am making changes to make them 
more dynamic so sites can add their own items / remove others and customize 
according to the user who is logged in. A site will still want to make 
their own version of the menu file but it should be less work to modify
> 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.)
There is a mechanism for merging web.xml fragments designed to make changes 
to web.core.xml unnecessary, however, the first release was buggy and I 
doubt it will work in all cases, however, if you send me the modifications 
I'll have a go at getting them to work by merging.

If you can let me know all the changes you had to make to files outside of 
your cornell directory. I'll try and figure out if the changes could have 
been accommodated a different way or if there are other changes I can make 
so that the files do not need to be modified in future.

> 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.
This is all very useful. I'm sure that taking account of your feedback and 
that of others will help us fine tune the UI architecture and 
implementation so that it is easier for future adopters of Grouper.
> Joy



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GW Brown, Information Systems and Computing