Displaying HTML in Aras Innovator

Christopher Gillis — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 14:00:00 GMT

Whether it's enabling administrators to create custom Forms or change the default user interface through CUI, Aras Innovator allows for easy configuration of the out-of-the-box client. However, there are still times when a particularly complex UI will require custom HTML to be written. In these cases, Aras Innovator still makes it easy to plug HTML directly into the client. In this blog post, we'll cover three different ways that we can display HTML to our users.

From the TOC

The first method we'll cover is how to display an HTML file when the user selects an item in the TOC. This method of displaying HTML is actually built right into the Aras Innovator client and doesn't require any additional coding beyond what's already included in the HTML file.

We'll start by creating a new ItemType that will serve as the hub from which this HTML file will be called. For demonstration purposes, we'll name this ItemType HTML View. Once we've created this ItemType we'll navigate to the TOC View relationship tab and add a relationship to an Identity who will be able to see this custom view instead of the standard grid. You can even define different views for different Identities! Once we've created the new TOC View relationship, we'll set the Start Page to the relative path of our HTML file in the code tree. You should define this relative path in relation to the /Innovator/Client/scripts/ folder. For example, if your HTML file were in the /Innovator/Client/customer/ folder, your relative path would be ../customer/test.html.

One thing to note is that this Start Page property just needs to point to an HTML source, so you can even pass in the URL to a website. To try this out, let's pass in the Aras website as our Start Page and see what happens.

Note that this may not work for every website.

From a Dialog

Displaying HTML from the Table of Contents is a great way to display information in something like a dashboard. However, a different approach is more effective when we just need our users to perform some action or data entry. To do this, we can use our custom HTML page from a popup dialog using the sample below.

gist.github.com/.../dd1fb4fced517a9af0f46d35996eeb6a

You can check out our blog post on Opening Custom Dialogs for more tips like how to return data that a user enters in your custom dialog!

From a New Tab

The last approach we'll go over is how to display HTML in a new tab within the Aras Innovator client. You can do this with code similar to the sample below.

gist.github.com/.../cadbcb2624f8888699a6506483d20e1d

Please note that if you choose to use your own HTML page, you should use CSS to set a background color for the page. While writing the sample above, I did this using the bgcolor attribute on the body tag like so: <body bgcolor="#FFF">. If you don't do this, you'll notice that your HTML page appears to be drawn over the main grid.

Just like with the TOC, we can even pass in websites to be displayed within a tab!

Conclusion

If you have any ideas of how you could use these techniques or if you have a story about how you've already used these techniques, please leave a comment below!

Which version of technical documentation app is compatible with Innovator SP12?

bhavindesai — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 04:43:25 GMT

Hi, I've Aras Innovator 11 SP12. On installing Technical Documentation 11.0 R1, I get below error. Technical Documentation 11.0 R2 is compatible with only 11 SP14. Is there any version of technical doc that is compatible with Aras Innovator 11 SP12? Thanks, Bhavin 2018-08-14 15:16:51,905 [6] INFO Aras.Tools.ArasUpdateGui. Logger Checking package started: 'D:\users\dev\Aras\installers\ Aras Technical Documentation 11.0R1 CD Image\package.config' 2018-08-14 15:16:51,913 [6] INFO Aras.Tools.ArasUpdateGui. Logger Checking package finished 2018-08-14 15:16:52,217 [6] WARN Aras.Tools.ArasUpdateGui. Logger String[] {Incompatible version of Innovator} 2018-08-14 15:16:52,268 [6] WARN Aras.Tools.ArasUpdateGui. Logger String[] {Variable 'Technical Documentation' is not found in DB.} 2018-08-14 15:16:52,332 [6] WARN Aras.Tools.ArasUpdateGui. Logger Incompatible version of Innovator Variable 'Technical Documentation' is not found in DB. 2018-08-14 15:16:52,335 [6] ERROR Aras.Tools.ArasUpdateGui. Logger Aras.Tools.ArasUpdateCore. Implementations.Commands. CheckCompatibilityPackageComma nd: Incompatible version of Innovator Variable 'Technical Documentation' is not found in DB. 2018-08-14 15:16:52,344 [6] INFO Aras.Tools.ArasUpdateGui. Logger Operation 'Install' failed