indicating staging system

[agalliker]

I would like to define a background colour in the Integrity LM client for users working on the DEV system of our staging environment.

this colour must be controlled by the server - as the the user(s) could also connect to the PROD system > where the colour should be the default colour.

the idea is to prevent "test users" from creating productive data on a non-productive system.

I m aware of the lower right corner section where the users could see to which system they are connected > but unfortunately they do not realise what they see .... or just ignore it

[MichaelChatel]

Hi Adrian,

I think probably the best solution for you, given what you describe, is to create or customize item presentation templates (that is kind of the intent for them), that are used for each server specifically, as you can customize the item templates to have different background colours, and also have custom images if you desired, placed on the item templates.  ex.  It could specify "DEV" when the DEV_item_presentation template is used, or then on production, you would have a different template, that specifies "Production".

If that doesn't cover your scenario, you can also post a product idea on the forum, but I think the presentation templates are what you're looking for.

[VolkerEckardt]

Michael,

was also discussing such a request with my customer recently. Even if the technique you describe works well, there is one pitfall:

As soon as you need to stage the types to prod (to add another field), the presentation template from stage gets then moved to PROD as well.

Then, the PROD has the layout from the stage system.

How can we solve this?

Volker

[MichaelChatel]

Ahh... you're right.  I see what you mean.  I didn't think of a staging system scenario.

I think the only way then (and it would only work for the WebUI, not the GUI thick client), would be to hack/customize the webui.war file, that contains all the web interface/images, etc... and you would have to have seperate image files for each server, within.  I think another customer did that in the past (not supported, but they did their own customization in that manner).

Probably, a product idea would be good to post for this, as I can see a few customers voting for that - it seems a good use-case.

[VolkerEckardt]

Back to the initial request:

What I tend to do is installing the client twice. This is anyway a good idea because then you can:

- have STAGE and PROD window open for review

- change the color of STAGE to whatever color you like

The only downside is: you need to be strict in terms which Integrity Client app is STAGE and which is PROD

[agalliker]

Thank you Volker and Michael for your very valuable inputs.

in fact we have a DEV > QAS staging array and a second QAS > PROD

therefore the approach with more than one client installation would either end up in 3 installations or having one for PROD and another for NON-PROD.

And as we can not use the WebUi for some functionality which is used in our Integrity it makes no sense to hack the webui.war file.

Possibly, excluding all the unexperienced "standard" users from the non-prod system is the most straight-forward approach.

A user who has to test some new features or functionality on DEV and QAS must be trained to check the lower right corner AND must be able to understand what the server name means.

[VolkerEckardt]

What about this:

you have an image like this:

You put this on top of each presentation template into a new frame, and you set the "Visible When" property of the framing region to "Is Dev System".

"Is Dev System" is a field of type logical, and it has to be assigned to all types where the message bar above is part of.

As soon as you set this field in Admin once to "relevant", the bar will appear.

As long as you don't stage this field with setting "relevant", the bar will never appear in PROD.

It will be shown in Dev like this:

You may also move this frame above the first common region, then this bar is always visible in any tab.

Volker

[VolkerEckardt]

Hello Adrian,

finally I implemented it much easier then described previously.

One image that you stage to prod (blank image), the same name with a real image like "TEST" and another "DEV" image that you keep on your dev.

Image link is: http://<server>:7001/images/Environment.png

Then, it looks like this:

and on Test:

This solution works well for any Item in View and Edit mode.    Just for the document view I am not sure about how to manage ...

Volker