Customizing the Portal's Appearance

When implementing the SAS Information Delivery Portal, you can easily customize the portal's appearance to meet the requirements of your organization. You can customize the appearance in the following ways:

• Modify the portal's cascading style sheets to incorporate different colors of background and text. Cascading style sheets are a standard mechanism for defining consistent and reusable formatting instructions for Web-based content.

• Modify or replace the portal's main graphical elements, including the company logo, banner, and background image.

Note: You can also modify the language or wording used for menu items, messages, and other text in the portal. For detailed instructions, see Localizing the Portal.

To customize the portal's appearance, follow these steps:

1. Locate the themes directory and files.

   The themes\default directory contains the files that control the appearance of the SAS Information Delivery Portal. When you first download and unzip the portal software, you can find this directory in the portal setup directory. When you are finished installing the portal, you can find this directory within the portal application on the Web server. The directory contains the following files:

   • Portal.css
   • sasStyle.css
   • sasads.css
   • Banner_primary.gif
   • Logo.gif
   • Background.gif

2. Back up the default theme.

   Before starting to customize the portal's appearance, you should create a backup copy of the themes\default directory. You can place the copy in the themes directory and give it a name such as default_bak.

3. Determine which styles and graphics to modify.

   Determine which aspects of the portal's appearance you would like to change. To determine which style sheets and graphics files you need to modify in order to implement these changes, refer to the following:

   • Illustrated Guide to Portal Graphics
   • Illustrated Guide to Portal Styles
   • Reference Guide to Portal Styles

4. Modify the theme.

   Make the desired changes to the files in the themes\default directory.

Invoking the Theme

The portal invokes style sheets based on settings in the portal's resources.properties file. You can find this file in the path \WEB-INF\classes\com\sas\edir\portal\res within the portal setup directory and application directory. The resources file contains the following settings:

# theme
theme.sasstylesheet={0}/themes/{1}/sasStyle.css
theme.stylesheet={0}/themes/{1}/Portal.css
theme.sasadsstylesheet={0}/themes/{1}/sasads.css
theme.imagedir={0}/themes/{1}/

These settings must contain the correct path and file name for each style sheet.

Restoring the Default Theme

At a later time, if you decide to revert to the original theme, you can assign a different name to the default directory (for example, my_default), and then rename the backup directory to "default."