With the release of the Cireson Portal version 9.0, the CMDB Portal app is now available. Fantastic! What is that? The CMDB Portal provides the ability to display and modify data for the out-of-the-box Configuration Item classes (CI) and/or custom CI classes within the Cireson Analyst Portal. In this blog I’ll give you a step-by-step walk through on how to add your custom CI class to the Cireson Analyst Portal, add your custom CI class form, and set custom CI form security. Note: This blog assumes you have your custom CI class already created.
So, let’s begin!
Navigate to the Settings/Admin Settings/Dynamic Data. On the Dynamic Data page under Table Filters, click the “Add” button and begin typing the custom CI class, search results begin to display, select the desired custom CI class and click Update.
Once the class is listed in the “Filtername” table, click “Save” at the bottom of the web page. A dialog box will appear as shown below.
Click “Yes”. This will restart the “platform cache service” on the Cireson Portal Server, recognize the newly added custom CI class and begin to create the table within the ServiceManagement DB based on the custom CI class. Upon completion of the table creation process a data sync for any data in that custom CI class located in the ServiceManager DB will sync to the newly created custom CI class table in the ServiceManagement DB.
I know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry. Any data changes made in the custom CI class at a later time within Service Manager console/ServiceManager DB will sync to the ServiceManagement DB and vice versa because of the “platform cache service”.
To expose the newly added custom CI class fields and data within the Cireson Portal we’ll create a simple webpage on the Cireson Portal as follows.
Navigate to the Settings/Navigation Settings. Add a New Page at the root or as a submenu based on your requirements. Fill out the information on the New Page accordingly. If you want to restrict who has access to access the new page, use Assign AD Groups. Note – this has nothing to do with Forms (We’ll get to that later), just who has access to the new page from the Navigation Pane.
Click on the newly created page within the Navigation Pane and a blank page appears as shown below. Select the “Layout” option on the bottom of the page. A display of a dozen layouts appears, in most cases the layout in the upper left-hand corner of the slide out will work. If you want to expose many classes, select the appropriate layout for your requirements. Click “Close” and your back to the blank page with your selected layout.
Select the “Content” option on the bottom of the page. You are now presented with the “Add New Content” slide out as shown below. In most cases you’ll select “ODATA Table Widget”, but again, make your selection based on your requirements.
Once you’ve made your selection it will return to the webpage with your selected widget as shown below. On the newly added widget click the “gear” icon in the upper right-hand corner of the widget.
The OData Table Widget slide out now appears for configuration as shown below. Provide the following:
- Title: Title of the Selected Widget
- Description: Provide a description, if needed
- OData End Point: To connect to the Cireson OData End Point (API) type “/platform/api”. This exposes the Cireson platform tables within the ServiceManagement DB
- Choose Collection: Select the appropriate table. In this case it would be the custom CI class we added earlier.
- Query String: Provide a string if you want to filter the fields/data from your custom CI class.
- Filter by Current Language: By checking this, only data with language the same as the logged in user viewing the data will be seen.
- Choose and Arrange Columns: Select the columns from the custom CI class to show in the OData Widget table.
- Custom Desktop Template/Custom Mobile Template: The solution will automatically create the view based on the above selections in HTML format. By clicking either of the Desktop or Mobile the default HTML is exposed. Here you have the option to modify the HTML if you choose.
Click “Apply”.
After clicking “Apply”, I recommend you click “Save” at the bottom of the webpage as shown below to save all changes up to this point.
If any data exist within your custom CI class, the data will appear in the table as shown above. If data exist, it will appear in a dynamically built form as shown below.
If you’d like to create a custom form to display the custom CI class, check out the Cireson Support Portal Custom Form Creation KB. If you have a custom form for the custom CI class, the form name must be named the same as listed in the “Identity ID” section of the custom CI class management pack and placed in the “C:\inetpub\CiresonPortal\CustomSpace\ConfigItem” directory.
Note – The CustomSpace\ConfigItem directory is only used for custom CI class forms. All other forms are placed in the \CustomSpace directory.
Now that the custom CI class is in the solution, data is sync’ed and you have a custom form. You have the option of setting AD Group security on the custom form. To set the custom form security, navigate to the Settings/Admin Settings/Group Settings (Detailed Group Setting KB located on Cireson Support Portal). The Group Settings page appears, under Assign forms to the active directory groups, click the Add button as shown below.
In the AD Group with Access textbox enter the username of the group that you want to target the form to. Next specify the Form ID which is listed at the top of the custom form JS file. You can leave the Ordinal as 0. In the case where a given user logging into the portal is a member of more than one group that has a form targeted at it, the ordinal can be used to decide which form takes precedence. The smaller number wins.
For the form type, begin typing the name of your custom CI class, select your custom CI class when found. For the Form Projection, begin typing the name of your custom CI class, select your custom CI class when found.
Then click the Update button.
