Customizing the Layout of Advanced Request Offerings (Portal version 6.0)

Candice_Yeudall

While the Advanced Request Offering by Cireson give us more control over what we are offering our users, we all know that the longer a form is visually the less likely a user is to fill it out. To deal with this issue a introduced some custom coding within the Advanced Request Offering to tighten the form up.
(Please note that I had started this in version 5 of the portal, but Cireson changed their coding in version 6 forcing me to redo all of it. So the code shown below will only work with version 6.)

For anyone who is interested here is how I got my offering to have 3 columns instead of 1.
For anyone wondering about why I did my coding as I did here is a bit more in depth explanation:
</td> <td style=" max-width: 25%; white-space: nowrap; padding-left:5px;">department

• I closed the previous cell in this line so that the text box appears under Title
• I user the max-width so that each of my elements fit and I have some responsiveness to resizing
• white-space: nowrap is used to stop the text from wrapping too soon in the cell (if you play with the True/False you will see what I mean)
• padding-left:5px is used for the spacing between the text boxes

</td>  </tr><tr><td>Type of Incident:</td></tr> <tr> <td style=" ">
Unauthorized/improper use</td> <td style="white-space:nowrap; ">
Unauthorized&nbsp;Access</td> <td style="white-space:nowrap; ">
Computer security hack/attack</td> </tr>  <tr><td style="white-space:nowrap; ">

• When I move in to the True/False checkboxes you will note that I have moved the location of my coding, the row and cell tags are now in the row before the text - this is so that the checkbox appears before the text

Hope this helps some one.

Conner_Wood

Unbelievable amount of effort, just look at those checkboxes!
Cireson could learn a thing or two from how good this looks. *hint hint*

Joe_Burrows

Agree three columns in an RO looks much better, great work @Candice_Yeudall

Brett_Moffett

@Candice_Yeudall have you considered placing this in the Feature request section for the portal?
The ability to format forms across multiple columns is a great idea I think.
Or even just the ability to group a bunch together an a fenced off area on the screen to keep like items together could be quite nice.

Also do remember that there is the ability to create Advanced Request Offerings across several pages so that can reduce the clutter quite a lot...   But it is on another page...  I know.

Adrian_Paech

Nice one! Good work candice

Candice_Yeudall

No I had not considered placing this as a request as Cireson already told me

... is truly creative but by no means would I consider it to be a usual or standard use case

james_kleinschnitz Cireson Dev, Product Owner, I took that to mean that Cireson feels that their customers are generally not looking to maximize the use of screen real estate and that having 50 check boxes each on their own line is acceptable. Knowing my user base there is no way they would do a from that extends that long.

I have also noted that there are so many feature requests going in to Cireson that unless someone duplicates the request it tends to get lost very quickly and that the Cireson forum user base is having a very hard time finding and keeping track of what has been requested, by others.

I also feel that Cireson has to look at and deal with some of the major requests that have already been put forth i.e. watcher lists for requests. There is a point when it becomes useless to put in more requests for things especially when the people you are making the request to have already shown they have no plans to pursue the idea (as shown in quote above).

james_kleinschnitz

Just want to share the thread Candice is referring to:

https://community.cireson.com/discussion/comment/2877#Comment_2877

and the full statement I made: 

Candice what you have done here is truly creative but by no means would I consider it to be a usual or standard use case.  With that being said in order to meet customer demand of an adaptive UI we made a large number of CSS changes, but we tested them against known customization's. If you were willing to share a test example we could add it to our test environments and test against it in the future.

As for your concerns about feature request and particularity the "Watchlist" feature, @chris_ross has commented on that thread and has informed the community that is has been accepted and will get added to the product. https://community.cireson.com/discussion/220/allow-users-to-add-work-items-to-a-watchlist#latest

Jeremy_Castleberry

That's a lot of work - thanks for sharing. I agree - more compact forms are nicer.

Darryl_Munro

This is awesome stuff and having a form with three columns would be fantastic. Out of curiosity what does line one of the ARO include?

Cheers Darryl

Eric_Krasner

@Candice_Yeudall, I was wondering if you have had any success in porting this solution over to the 7.x portal.  I have been trying to get it working, but as soon as I add in the table code, the ARO stops functioning.  As a mater of fact, you can't even submit the RO, it just hangs in the portal.

Candice_Yeudall

No I haven't, I will look at it today and let you know what I find. We are still using version 6.x

Chris_Holden

Eric,

I am not a web developer by any means, but based on some testing I have done in V 8.1.1.2016, this is either a lot more difficult than before or just can't be achieved anymore. It seems to get confused by the code that is embedded between the prompts, in my test of the above code I could only get it to display a multi prompt table on the left 50% of the offering. We did not actually test if the ticket could be submitted but I believe we would have run into the same issue as you. This I believe would be due to the amount of HTML ending tags that would then be placed inside the table rather than after it (again not a web developer so this is my best guess)

I did find that it is a useful way to provide a display only table which is relevant to the previous prompt. However, it will inherit the blue underline for the header row from the html which creates the "page" tabs if using an advanced offering.

Other testing I have done has been successful in creating the table across the whole width of the offering but I have not been able to find a solution to being unable to submit the offering when trying to put multiple prompts within the table.

That said, even if I did find a solution I don't know that I would implement it due to the fact a version upgrade seems likely to break what I have designed. Best of luck to you though.

Chris

Eric_Krasner

Thanks for that update.  I was afraid that would be the case.  It seems too fragile when dealing with version upgrades.

Jeremy_Castleberry

Well I hope that Cireson implements some tools for something similar then.

Candice_Yeudall

Unfortunately I have not had time to do any testing again, but it seems like every time Cireson updates the version they rewrite the code as well this means that anything that works in one version will not work in the next and it is hours of work to find the new names and properties that they have set. This has lead us to not bothering to continue to use the nice looking forms.