What are the ways to customize/revamp Bonita User Portal ?
Hi all,
We want to customize the default Bonita User Portal
To give a better idea of what we mean by "Customization", these can be considered as requirements 1. Remove the Tasklist Panel at the left - Replace with custom options 2. Remove the "'Tasks','Cases','Apps'" panel In short, entire Portal should accomodate the UI(forms) and other custom controls and menu options.
To achieve this,the ways explored by us were
Playing around with Look 'N' Feel available in Bonita Studio Issue: Limited control over the portal. Only the colors, fonts and sizes can be changed through CSS. Not able to revamp the portal as such. The login page is JSP, so i was able to change it completely. As per my understanding, unlike login page we do not have much control over the portal - The portal artifacts are being stored in DB in binary format. At runtime, Bonita engine extracts this info and apply CSS and rendering the page. Not sure how to change the artifacts stored in DB. Please correct if my understanding is wrong.
Exporting the default portal Look 'N' Feel, customizing and importing the customized Look 'N' Feel to Portal Issue: We were only able to modify the "Styling" (CSS), but unable to change the Layout
BonitaLife - Bonita's integration with Liferay the Portal designing tool Issue: Liferay is unable to identify the presence of Bonita and Liferay incurs additional license cost.
Am I wrong in exploring any of the above ways? Is there any other ways to revamp the Bonita User Interface [Including Portal, Forms, Controls, Widgets etc]?
Hello Rajasekhard,
You are right on the different integration. The look and feel can help you only on the look and feel.
You have three options : * change the JSP page of the portal, then add some JQUERY script to hide all the function you want. OF COURSE, THIS IS TECHNICALY POSSIBLE, BUT STRONGLY DISCOURAGE : first you may have some disfonctionnement on the portal, and on a new version, this should not work.
using the profile in the Bonita Portal, you can build your own profile, where you set all the different menu you want. This function is available in the subscription Platform. According your requirement, you can fit your goal.
build your own portal. Then, you can develop the function you like. You can use a existing portal like Liferay.
Hope this help.
Comments
Hi,
Just to add up to Pierre-Yves' reply, please note that BonitaLife is a third party contribution so it is not supported by BonitaSoft. Also, from what I recall this extension is only compatible with Bonita v5 and not v6.
Cheers,
Philippe O.
Greetings Pierre-Yves & Philippe, thanks a lot for the response
So after a quick analysis of 3 ways suggested by Pierre-Yves, these are my understandings. Correct me if I'm wrong
Method 1: Changing the JSP Page of portal needs a lot of effort and even then, it might be inconsistent and hence not at all recommended
Method 2: Creating a custom Profile will only let me configure my Menu from the default Pages (Tasks, Cases, Apps, Roles etc.,) but will not let me create my own Pages or let me change the layout of Bonita User Portal
Method 3: LifeRay integration is not supported by BonitaSoft LifeRay is not compatible with Bonita BPM V6.
So my queries now would be,
Query 1:
Has the support to LifeRay integration ended with V5? Or is it not yet available for V6 and would be available in future? If no, what are the alternatives to LifeRay?
This is because it seemed that LifeRay can meet our Portal requirements.
Query 2:
How about this approach i. Create our own Web Application ii. Use Bonita APIs to get required information (Business as well as Process) from Bonita.
My understanding is, this approach lets us have our process running on Bonita BPM and yet lets us have our own UI.
Yes, it's viable, see an example on http://pozil.github.io/#/post/2014-09-30