Administration Guide

Customizing Portlets

Deprecated in 2021

You can customize all portlets available on the Home page except Tools.

The set of portlets for each column is defined inside <Portlets> ... </Portlets> blocks. The content of each portlet is specified within <add ... /> statements through portlet attributes.

For example, the Popular Articles portlet is configured as follows:

<Portlets>
	<add Title="FRAME_TITLE.POPULAR_ARTICLES"
	PortletType="KBArticles"
	AnonymousAccess="true"
	CategoryName=""
	ItemCount="5"
	OrderBy="Views DESC, Created_Date DESC"
	Filter="" />
</Portlets>

Each portlet has a PortletType identifier, that defines the portlet type:

  • Announcements,
  • LatestUpdates,
  • KBArticles,
  • Custom.

The set of available attributes for each portlet depends on the portlet type (see the table below).

Portlet Type Attributes

Announcements

Title, ItemCount, AnonymousAccess

LatestUpdates

Title, ItemCount

KBArticles

Title, AnonymousAccess, CategoryName, ItemCount, OrderBy, Filter

Custom

Title, AnonymousAccess, Height, URL

For description of portlet attributes, see the following table:

Attribute Description Available in portlets

Title

Contains the reference to the corresponding entry in the localization dictionary. If you need to change the portlet title, you must modify the localization dictionary. Portlet titles are stored inside the <Area Name="HOME"> ... </Area> block.

For details on modifying localization dictionary, see Adding new entries to your localization dictionaries.

All portlets

CategoryName

The category supplying displayed items. Make sure to enter its full path in the categories tree (e.g. Manufacturer\Alloy Software).

KBArticles

ItemCount

ItemCount works together with the OrderBy attribute (see below) to determine "top" N items to show in the portlet.

All portlets except Custom

OrderBy

The display order of items. This attribute is an expression in the form of a SQL “ORDER BY” clause (without the words ORDER BY), that determines the sorting order for database records. You can specify one or more columns on which to sort the records. To sort on a column in descending order, add the DESC keyword after the column name. The ItemCount attribute (see above) sets the limit on the number of records from the resulting recordset that will appear in the portlet.

For example, to show 5 most popular and recent KB articles, you need to sort them by the total number of views, then by date, both in descending order, and set ItemCount to 5.

KBArticles

Filter

An optional filter expression in the form of a SQL “WHERE” clause (without the word WHERE), which returns a true/false value.

KBArticles

AnonymousAccess

Determines whether the portlet is available to anonymous users (true or false). By default, each user that accesses the Self Service Portal must have an SSP Customer account in Alloy Navigator Express. However, when configuring the Self Service Portal, you can specify which parts of your portal anonymous users can access.

For details on anonymous access, see Installation Guide: Enabling Anonymous Access.

Announcements

Custom

KBArticles

Height

The portlet height in pixels. If not specified, the portlet height is set to 200px.

Custom

URL

The URL of your custom HTML page to display.

If you want to display a local HTML file, the file must be located in a sub-folder of the SSP installation directory. The URL in this case should contain a partial path to the file. For example, to display the contents of the Custom.htm file located in the CustomPortlets sub-folder, specify the URL as CustomPortlets/Custom.htm.

Custom