Customizing the UI of AS

The Management Console user interface (https://localhost:9443/carbon) of a Carbon product consists of two layers:

1. UI inherited from WSO2 Carbon platform contains the templates, styles (css files), and images that are stored in the core Carbon UI bundle stored in <PRODUCT_HOME>/repository/components/plugins/ org.wso2.carbon.ui_<version-number>.jar where <version-number> is the version of the Carbon kernel that the product is built on. This bundle is responsible for the overall look and feel of the entire Carbon platform.
2. UI unique to each product contains all the styles and images that override the ones in core Carbon platform. This file is in <PRODUCT_HOME>/repository/components/plugins/org.wso2.<product-name>.styles_<version-number>.jar where <version-number> is the version of the product.

The following topics explain how to download a Carbon product and customize its user interface.

Setting up the development environment

To download and set up the product environment for editing, take the following steps.

1. Download your product.
2. Extract the ZIP file into a separate folder in your hard drive. 
3. Go to the <PRODUCT_HOME>/repository/components/plugins/ directory to find the required JAR files:
   • org.wso2.carbon.ui_<version-number>.jar
   • org.wso2.<product-name>.styles_<version-number>.jar
4. Copy the JAR files to a separate location on your hard drive. Since the JAR files are zipped, you must unzip them to make them editable.

You can now customize the look and feel of your product by modifying the contents of the JAR files as described in the next section.

Customizing the user interface

Customizing the product interface involves changing the layout/design of the Carbon framework as well as changing the styles and images specific to the product. The following topics explain how some of the main changes to the product interface can be done.

Changing the layout

The layout of the Carbon framework is built using a tiles JSP tag library. The use of tiles allows us to break the presentation of the layout into small JSP snippets that perform a specific function. For example, header.jsp and footer.jsp are the tiles corresponding to the header and footer in the layout. The template.jsp file controls the main layout page of the Carbon framework, which holds all the tiles together. That is, the header part in the template.jsp file is replaced with the <tiles:insertAttribute name="header"/> tag, which refers to the header.jsp file. The template.jsp file as well as the JSP files corresponding to the tiles are located in the org.wso2.<product-name>.styles_<version-name>.jar/web/admin/layout/ directory.

Therefore, changing the layout of your product primarily involves changing the template.jsp page (main layout page) and the JSP files of the relevant JSP tiles. 

Changing the styles on the Carbon framework

The global.css file, which determines the styles of the Carbon framework, is located in the org.wso2.carbon.ui_<version-name>.jar/web/admin/css/ directory. You can edit this file as per your requirement. Alternatively, you can apply a completely new stylesheet to your framework instead of the default global.css stylesheet.

To apply a new style sheet to the carbon framework:

1. Copy your new CSS file to this same location. 
2. Open the template.jsp file located in the org.wso2.carbon.ui_<version-name>.jar/web/admin/layout/ directory, which contains the main layout of the page and the default JavaScript libraries. 

3. Replace global.css with the new style sheet by pointing the String globalCSS attribute to the new stylesheet file.

   //Customization of UI theming per tenant
   	String tenantDomain = null;
   	String globalCSS = "../admin/css/global.css";
   	String mainCSS = "";

Changing the product specific styles and images

The styles and images unique to your product are located in the org.wso2.<product-name>.styles_<version-number>.jar folder. To modify product specific styles and images, take the following steps.

1. Copy the necessary images to the org.wso2.<product-name>.styles_<version-number>.jar/web/styles/images/ directory. For example, if you want to change the product banner, add the new image file to this directory.
2. Open the main.css file located in the org.wso2.<product-name>.styles_<version-name>.jar/web/styles/css/ directory.

3. To specify a new product banner, change the background-image attribute of org.wso2.<product-name>.styles_<version-name>.jar/web/styles/css/main.css file as follows:

   /* ---------------- header styles ------------------ */
   div#header-div {
       background-image: url( ../images/newproduct-header-bg.png);
   	height:70px;
   }

Starting the server

In the preceding steps, you have done the changes to the product interface after copying the JAR files to a separate location on your hard drive. Therefore, before you start your production server, these files must be correctly copied back to your production environment as explained below.

1. Compress the contents of the org.wso2.carbon.ui_<version-number>.jar and org.wso2.<product-name>.styles_<product-version>.jar folders into separate ZIP files.
2. Change the name of the ZIP file to org.wso2.carbon.ui_<version-number>.jar and org.wso2.<product-name>.styles_<version-number>.jar respectively.
3. Copy these two new JAR files to the <PRODUCT_HOME> /repository/components/plugins/ directory in your product installation.
4. Start the server.