Publishing an Info Browser Widget in Infor Smart Office
April 17, 2016
By Vince McGowan, Sr. Principal Software Engineer
The Infor Lawson Info Browser widget is a powerful query tool that can be useful for displaying ‘exception data’ and/or charts, or simply to provide information necessary to do your day-to-day Infor Lawson work. In a previous post we demonstrated how to export and import Info Browsers and now we are going to show how to publish an Info Browser to the Widget Library.
Once defined, the widget can be published to the Widget Library by users with Portal Admin rights so as to make the query available to all users. Let’s look at how the publishing process works.
First, create an instance of the widget that is to be shared. Let’s assume we want to monitor Vendors with a current balance greater than $50,000. Open the Widget Library and drag the Lawson Info Browser widget to the canvas. The Settings dialog opens and we enter the following values:
General Tab
- Title = Excess Vendor Balance
- Table = APVENBAL
- Check ‘Item Launches Form’ and enter AP90.6
Fields Tab
- Click the Choose button
- Select the following columns: VENDOR-GROUP, COMPANY, VENDOR, and CURRENT-BAL and change the labels as appropriate.
Criteria Tab
- Add the following criteria:
CURRENT-BAL, greater than, 50000
Save the settings and the widget will query and display something similar to below.
Double-click any line in the table and the Company Vendor Balance form will be launched and the associated data record displayed.
Now that the widget is displaying the information we desire, we are ready to publish to the Widget Library using the Predefined Widgets editor. (Note: you must have Portal Admin rights to take this action). Right-click in the table display area to see the context menu as displayed below and select ‘Publish Widget’.
Once selected, the Predefined Widgets window opens and a new entry created. Although there are lots of settings available, only a couple of them need to be set.
Widget ID – must be unique. One suggestion might be to include the Title as part of the ID. In this case, let’s use S3.Client.Excess.Vendor.Balance.
Localization – values are needed here to provide a useful name and description for the Widget Library entry. One or more locales can be specified, but typically ‘en-US’ is the minimum requirement.
That’s it. Click Save and assuming there are no restriction to the available widgets (defined for Mango.Core in the ISO Settings editor), the next time anyone logs into Infor Smart Office the widget is available in the Widget Library.
If you would like to learn more about Infor Smart Office contact your Account Executive for a demo or contact us..
Can formulas be used in Infobrowser criteria? I am trying to list all items in a warehouse where the Average-Cost < (LAST-REC-COST * .75).
Unfortunately no. That would be controlled by the program on the server to which the InfoBrowser, as well as the Add-Ins Query Wizard, settings go. That’s nice idea though. Please enter an Enhancement Request on InforXtreme for the Data Service Call program.
Would one be able to push a widget to show up for all users of smart office. Goal would be to have a way to communicate e.g. downtime to the users. (I thought of using the web browser widget for that).
Sorry, but no that is not possible and there is no facility for broadcasting a message to all signed in users. While User Logon History is able to tell you of recent user log-ins, there is no way to determine which users are currently logged on.
Vince, thanks for the comment.
I have not been clear enough. I meant, how can I make a widget allways appear for the user after signon? That way, with a webpage, I can easier communicate stuff than with email. Other ideas to accomplish the same are offcourse welcome .
Currently the only way to guarantee that all users have a certain widget(s) on their canvas is to create a new default canvas and restrict their ability to define their own canvas. I don’t think you would really want to limit users in that way.
One idea, but takes some development effort – using the Smart Office SDK, create a new ISO application (and enable it in the profile) that on startup will launch your custom web page.
Erik, you might try putting a browser window on the default canvas… In the start box, enter http://yourNewsWebsite. This will open your webpage, and should put a minimized window up in the Smart Office task bar – right click that and select “launch at startup”. To Vince’s point, unless you lock the canvas down, this will not keep them from undoing that. You could also just drop a shortcut to your page on the default canvas, or put it on a Startpad. In the meantime, I vote for supporting startup scripts in Smart Office – at least a list of URLS or jscripts to run.
Hi Vince, David,
Thank you for your input. Partly due to time restrictions and the reservations you raised I have given up the idea for now.
I like the idea David raised for “startup scripts”.