Extending Data Sources & Views in the Cireson SCSM Portal

One of the (many) cool things about the Cireson SCSM Portal is the flexibility and extensibility of showing information to users in various ways. While there are areas that require some coding knowledge and awareness, we provide many avenues to implement cool features, tips, and tricks for your Cireson SCSM Portal.  Working with one of our Support Team superstars, Justin Workman,  I want to share a useful feature for extending information from the Survey App into the Portal.

In our ‘out of the box’ Survey App setup, there is a default view of survey information of when a survey is taken.

Survey 1

Survey 2

We are going to expand on this information to present the survey taker and workitem data in a different page format. We will carry out the following 3 steps in this use case, but they can apply for any scenario you can think of for your environment.

  1. Create the data source
  2. Layout the custom page
  3. Add to navigation tab

This will be a quick walkthrough of the steps. We have a variety of KB articles for each step, if you’d like to dig deeper. The goal here is to tie these steps together and spark your own creativity!

Create the data source

The data source we are using is a dashboard query. The query can be added to the datasource table by a SQL insert script, or through the Portal under Admin Settings > Dashboard Query Settings. In this example, we built 2 queries; one to return the information of the survey takers and another to return the survey questions. It is always useful to test that your SQL query is returning the required data through a tool like SQL management studio.

Layout the Custom Page in the Cireson SCSM Portal

Keeping to best practices, all the customization lives in the CustomSpace folder. Creating a subfolder for the customization is also a good practice, keeping the related files together. Here’s the structure for the files used:

Survey 3
The surveyreport.js file in Views folder is used to launch the file in survey-reportVP.js in the ViewPanel folder – this structure follows our standard for deploying custom pages.

The report.html file sets the styling and calls the report.js as a script. The code uses kendo to render a grid layout with survey taker information and the related workitems. It also creates the boxes used to show questions and answers:

Cireson SCSM Portal
Add the navigation tab

For access to the new page, we simply create a navigation link which is added to the existing folder for Survey App:

Survey 5

Conclusion

The tools used to provide this custom enhancement to the Survey App are readily available within the Cireson SCSM Portal and are constantly being improved upon. I hope this simple use case helps to get you thinking of ways you can incrementally improve your Cireson SCSM Portal experience!

The code used in this example will be made available on our Cireson Community site for download and use. Please share your feedback!

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