Clarity

I just installed Clarity 12.1. Management now wants the log-in screen customized to reflect the environment the user is logging into and the company logo.

I need to be able to display the environment name, such as Dev, Test or Production in the upper left hand screen of the log-in screen. We currently log into the URL http://hostname:7111/niku/app?.

I am not an HMTL programmer so I am not sure how to go about this. Is there someplace in the Clarity App that I can put the image files for this or do I need to get someone to do some coding? Maybe there is just one log-in file that I can modify to reflect the info I need.

I also need to display the environment name in the corner of the application when the user is logged in.

Can anyone point me to some documentation on how to do this?

Thank you

How to do all this is documented in the manuals. For v12 it is all in the "Installation Guide" manuals and for v8 it was in the "Administration Guide" (same content, it has just changed location!).

The detail you are after is under the "UI Themes" discussions in those various guides and its just a matter of replacing default image files on your application server rather than changing any code.

(If you don't have the manuals, now would be a good time to downloads them from the Documentation link on the main support site or you can find them using the "Search" functionality on this site).

Found it - https://support.ca.com/cadocs/1/CA%20Clarity%20PPM%2012%201%200%20%20On%20Demand%20-FIN/Bookshelf_Files/HTML/Installation%20Guide/index.htm?toc.htm?594271.html?fromKBResultsScreen=T

I was searching for the wrong terms.

Thank You

Yes you can read the manual online as well.
You change the image completely or modify the original.
I've added text to the image (in MSpaint) giving the environment, Clarity and versions.
The login box for user name and password come separately so you don't have to do any programming.

Martti K.

^ Xinify logo; thats a bit old-school :*)

I found the "login.gif" a bit harder to satisfactorily edit in V12+ than the one in the earlier versions; probably because its a lot smaller in V12 (CA give us less real-estate to play with outside the user-name/password boxes that are automatically added).

A useful note is also that when you edit that GIF you need to account for the "Invalid Login" error message that you might get back from the logon attempt!

Yes you have to leave enough space for the messages in addition to the boxes.

Martti K.

We used to work with the login gif to show the the right environment and some static text.
But this is very annoying if you have a lot of environments, like we have.
In our upgrade to version 12 we did a more complex solution. We added a custom environment table wich holds the active environment name.
With some ajax script we get the environment name from the database and display it in the login window. The extra benefit of this solution is, that you are also sure that you have connected to the right database. To complete this, we also made a custom object with logon messages that are showed on the logon screen and can be edited as a custom object within Clarity.

Yes I read the documentation. After reading the simple instructions, coping files basically, it did work. The changes I was making to the gif file showed up the first few times, but as I was tweaking them, the changes stopped appearing on the screen.

I called CA support. They actual told me they don't support the instructions in the installation manual that involve custom login screens. If you read the instructions it is pretty basic stuff. Make a back-up of the current files and then replace the old files with your files, making sure they are the same name and size. No problem right. What they fail to mention is that the images are also stored in a very long temp path. So for some reason these files where not getting cleared out from the temp directory. When I made changes in the directory supplied by the instructions, my changes did not show up. At the time I didn't know about the temp directory. I tried restarting the app and my PC to clear the cache. No luck. I just stumbled onto the temp directory while doing a search for my files. The images are kept in four different directories. So now I don't know which files are which. I got a call from CA, so I asked about these temp directories. I was told they are caching directories and should be cleared out each time I restart a Clarity session. They aren't. Hopefully I can get back to this after I get my DB upgrade issue resolved. I believe if the files in the temp directory don't update with my changes I can just delete them each time. Not a big deal, just wish the instructions mentioned these temp files. I guess if things worked the way they are supposed to they don't need to mention them.

One thing I've done in the past is simply modify or change the brand.gif file. In the right ui folder it impacts all themes. From there, to distinguish one environment from the other, we altered their themes. Our test environments were yellow, dev light blue, qa green, prod dark blue. Whatever is to your liking. You could make many additional mods but I found the simple brand.gif change and the color theme change worked well.

Remember, if you're using Websphere to repackage and deploy your EAR files after making changes to the ui folders.

Of course, always backup the original graphic file before you make modifications.

A sample is attached below. All I did was move the letters around a bit and add the QA text.
.

For info: CA support have recently created a KB article concerning all this;

TEC512535

https://comm.support.ca.com/?legacyid=TEC512535

That certainly is covered now.
It is in the manuals and bookshelf, several times on the forum and now a KB article.

Though there is a small thing that catches my eye:

in 3. the above files might be better than the following files
or am I missing something?

Martti K.

^ Yes - a typo in the KB! :glare: