How to Change the Layout of a Process
Overview
The layout of a business process is defined largely through the template file used for generating the HTML page.
When a business process is created a standard set of templates are created - if you wish to just change the basic layout - you can change these templates.
But in some cases you wish to reuse the process - keep the original templates for one function - and create an new set of templates for another function. E.g. if you want to show a list of items to both a customer and an employee - you would often need to show more details to the employee than to the customer.
Defining a new presentation for a process specifies a new set of templates for the process - giving the opportunity to control the data to show to the user - and the possible actions available on each page.
The concepts section of the documentation contain more information about presentations and processes.
During the creation of a process it is possible to also create a default presentation for a process. This makes it unnecessary to create further presentations if you only need the default presentation.
Preparations
As a presentation defines an interface for a process - it is necessary to define the process first.
A presentation is an alias for a set of templates, which specifies the new layout for the process. This means that before you can use the new presentation, these templates need to be available and deployed.
However, as a presentation can be defined without any users having access to it - you can define the presentation before deploying the templates.
Create presentation
Select the menu item "Content loaders -> Business Processes"
Find the business process you wish to create a presentation for in the grid. Press "Presentations" for the business process.
The next page will show a grid containing the presentations already defined for the business process. Press "Insert" to create a new presentation for the business process.
You have to enter a value for the name of the presentation. The name of the presentation is used to identify the presentation in the lists shown in the administration interface.
In most situations you must also indicate a value for the "Template suffix".
The template suffix specifies the way the framework will find the template. The original template name followed by the suffix will be the name used to find the template when the presentation is used.
If for instance the original template is stored in the file MYTEMPL.htm, and the suffix for the presentations is _SUF, then the template used for the presentation will be MYTEMPL_SUF.htm.
Please note that ALL templates used by the process MUST exist in a version with the suffix.
This includes templates used for error pages dynamically loaded drop down boxes.