Develop > Presentation layer > Customize IBM Sales Center
Plan a customization to the IBM Sales Center
The following steps are a general overview of the actions required to customize the IBM Sales Center.
You can use steps to these to plan the customization effort.
Procedure
- Determine what to customize.
- For example, you may decide that to add new fields to the Identity page of the customer editor to display the last time the customer logged into the store.
- Determine the unique identifier, or ID, of the graphical user interface element that to modify.
- Continuing the example, determine the ID of the Identity page of the customer editor. By examining the com.ibm.commerce.telesales.ui.impl.customer plug-in's fragment.xml file, and reading the comments within the file, you can determine that ID of the default definition of the Identity page is customerIdentityCompositeDefinition.default. The Identity page is composed of many smaller definitions for each section of the page. Examine the definitions to determine exactly which section to modify. You can also enable the 'widget hover logging' option described in the steps in determining the ID of a user interface element.
- In the IBM Sales Center development environment, create a plug-in project.
- Write the own definition of the user interface element.
- To reuse existing user interface elements, use the referenceId to reference the existing definition instead of redefining it in the plug-in.
- If data must be sent from the client to the server add information to the user interface elements. For example,
- To send a name-value pair from the client to the server, use a property tag to add the name-value pair to the BOD. For more information see the Create a set of control widget elements step in the Adding a new search term in the IBM Sales Center tutorial.
- To send parameters to a controller command on the WebSphere Commerce server, ensure you set the modelPath value. See the Modify the user interface step of the Modifying a page in an editor tutorial and Extending the UserData element for more information.
- Create a properties file to store any locale-specific text. Extend the resource bundle extension point, com.ibm.commerce.resources.resources, to indicate the name and location of the properties file.
- Declare the system configurator using the system configurator extension point. This involves creating a config/config.ini directory and file. In this file, indicate that the IBM Sales Center should use the definition of the user interface element instead of the default definition.
- If necessary, write code on the WebSphere Commerce server side to process data.
- For example, you could write code to send the date of the user's most recent log in date from the server to the client. See Extending the UserData element for more information.
- Test the changes.
- Once you are satisfied with the changes, export the plug-in and distribute the plug-in, for example as a feature using an update site created in Rational Application Developer to which the IBM Sales Center clients will connect. See deploying customizations to the IBM Sales Center.
Related concepts
Eclipse and plug-ins in the IBM Sales Center client
User Interface Layouts in the IBM Sales Center
Overview of customizing IBM Sales Center
IBM Sales Center development environment
Deploy customizations to the IBM Sales Center
Related tasks
Example: Adding a user interface element using default WebSphere Commerce customization fields
Modify an existing Business Object Document reply message
Determine the ID of a user interface element in an editor page or dialog
Create an update site in Rational Application Developer
Import and searching in the IBM Sales Center user interface plug-ins
Related reference
Troubleshoot: IBM Sales Center customization
Related information
Business Object Documents long description