Administration Guide

Customizing views for SSP customers

This article describes data views available to Self Service Portal customers and tells how to customize them (for example, add or remove a column).

Predefined views

Alloy Navigator Express comes with these predefined views for the Self Service Portal:

  • Tickets — Views for Tickets. The availability of each view depends on the user access level.

    • All Tickets — The view displays all Tickets submitted by the user. Available to all SSP users.

    • Open Tickets — The view displays all non-closed Tickets submitted by the user. Available to all SSP users.

    • Closed Tickets — The view displays all closed Tickets submitted by the user. Available to all SSP users.

    • All Tickets (Manager) — The view displays all Tickets that the manager can see, depending on the access level. Available only to managers.

    • Open Tickets (Manager) — The view displays all non-closed Tickets that the manager can see, depending on the access level. Available only to managers.

    • Closed Tickets (Manager) — The view displays all closed Tickets that the manager can see, depending on the access level. Available only to managers.

      NOTE: Ticket views for managers are available to SSP users who have either Manager, Department Manager, or Organization Manager access level. For details on user access levels, see Understanding User Access Level.

  • Equipment Reservations — Views for Equipment Reservations:

    • All — This view displays all Equipment Reservations submitted by the user.

    • Open — This view displays all non-closed Equipment Reservations submitted by the user.

    • Closed — This view displays all closed Equipment Reservations submitted by the user.

  • All Equipment — This view shows all non-retired Library Items (which appear as equipment) available for reservation.

  • Assets — This view displays all Computers and Inventory Items that the user owns.

Knowledge Base Articles — This view displays public KB Articles with a "Live" status.

INFO: For details on publishing KB articles, see Help: Publishing KB articles on the Self Service Portal.

Customize views

You can customize any predefined view by adding, removing, or rearranging columns.

To customize a view, edit the views_config.xml file as explained further. This file is located in the config folder under the folder where Self Service Portal files are stored:

[PhysicalPathToSSP]\config\views_config.xml

The [PhysicalPathToSSP] is the placeholder for the physical path to Self Service Portal files.

NOTE: For instruction on viewing the physical path of Self Service Portal installation folder, see Physical Path to Self Service Portal Files.

This file contains multiple <ObjectView> sections corresponding to the views listed above, where Object indicates the object class such as Assets, Articles, etc. Each <ObjectView> section includes a <Fields> section, containing column names to be displayed in the Self Service Portal.

To add a column to the view:

  • Add the <Field Name="FieldName"> tag inside the <Fields> section, where FieldName is the name of the new field.

    Instead of field labels, use field names, where spaces, if any, are replaced with underscores. You can find field names under Customization > [Module] > [Object Class] > Fields.

    NOTE: For detailed instructions, see Example.

    TIP: If your users have multiple languages in the Self Service Portal, you may need to update your localization dictionaries after adding new columns to the views. For details, see Preparing a Localization Dictionary.

To remove a column from the view:

  • Delete the corresponding <Field Name> tag from the corresponding section.

To re-order columns:

  • Re-order the corresponding <Field Name> tag. The Self Service Portal displays columns in the order they are listed in the <Fields> section.

To revert back to the original views:

  • Replace your customized views_config.xml file with the default one from the SSP template. The views_config.xml.default template is available in the same folder. Alternatively, you can find the template in \\System\WebAppsTemplates\SSP\config under the Alloy Navigator Express installation folder.
Example

For example, you can add a Priority column to the Open Tickets (Manager) view as follows:

  1. Locate the views_config.xml file and open it with a text editor (for example, Microsoft Notepad or Notepad++).

  2. Find the <TicketView Name="Open Tickets (Manager)"> section.

  3. Add a <Field Name="Priority"/> tag inside, as displayed below.

  4. Save the views_config.xml file.