Thursday, October 28, 2010

Oracle WebCenter Interaction: Getting Around Adaptive Layout Stylesheet Conflict

In BEA AquaLogic UserInteraction 6.5 the concept of Adaptive Layouts was established to allow for simplified customization to general areas of the portal such as the search results pane, and portlet windows.
Unfortunately one detail they neglected to take into account was that some customers might like to also modify the corresponding adaptive layout stylesheet, which is an entirely different css than those generated by the CSS mill.

After making some modifications to our adaptive layout files and the corresponding CSS, I was disappointed to see that the default layouts were mucked up by my changes.  A support ticket confirmed that nothing had been done around this and there wasn't a solution in place.

Some options were available at this point:
  1. Don't modify the css...
  2. Assuming only one new css file is needed, forgo the original adaptive layouts and stick with the new changes
  3. Create all new css labels corresponding to the layout modifications, then either add them to the original css or as an addition to the standard css
  4. Redo the customizations so that they don't step on the toe's of the old customizations
  5. Blank out the entire mainstyle.css file and add new stylesheet paths into each adaptive layout (original and new)
Naturally, none of these reactive solutions appealed to me and just when I was about to throw in the towel and go with option #5 it dawned on me that there was an option #6!

6. Change the customized basepagelayout.html files to include the new stylesheet! Then you just need to call the basepagelayout associated with the stylesheet you want!

Ta-da!

No comments:

Post a Comment