Adding Links to the Web Client Home Page – InterAction® Administrator Answer Center

One of the most common types of customizations for the Web Client home page is adding additional links to other parts of the system and other sites. For example, you might want to do the following:

Add links to other important search forms and external search engines to the set of links under “Search For.”
Add links to some specific important lists of contacts, such as top clients and prospects.
Add “quick search” links to subsets of the organization’s contact lists, such as personnel in a particular office.
Add links to more help topics or to process procedures on your intranet.

Home Page Customized with New Links

[A] Custom link added to the Search for... nugget. This link opens the Clients search form.

[B] These are new nuggets added to the page to provide more custom links.

The out-of-the-box home page has several standard lists of links (Search for, Add a new, Message Center, and so on) and an additional list that is included if your organization has licensed one of the Related Modules.

Each of these is placed on the page using the formatSearchList.jsp nugget, which can display a set of links defined in a separate search list declaration. Therefore, how you change the links on the page depends exactly what you want to change:

If you just want to add new links to one of the out-of-the-box lists, you edit the corresponding search list declaration.

In the figure above, that is how the new item for Clients was added to the “Search for” list.
If you want to add an entirely new block of links, you need to edit the page declaration to add a new instance of the formatSearchList.jsp nugget, then also add a new search list declaration to define the links.

In the example above, the Other Resources nugget is an entirely new instance of the formatSearchList.jsp nugget that has been added to the page.

For more about adding new nuggets to the home page, see Changing the Layout and Nuggets on the Home Page.

The following table describes the out-of-the-box search list declarations used on the home page:

Section of the Page	Links	Search list Declaration
Search for...	People Companies Activities Matters, Opportunities, or Engagements (if licensed) These links open the corresponding search forms on the contact search page.	home-search
Add a new...	Contact (opens the new contact wizard) Activity Reminder Matters, Opportunities, or Engagements (if licensed) Modifying this search list is not recommended.	home-add
Message Center	Dynamic links depending on the state of the user’s contacts. Modifying this search list is not recommended.	home-message
Related Modules	Displays a link to the data quality searches for the Related Modules (InterAction Opportunities, InterAction Engagements, and InterAction Matters). The link only appears if your organization has licensed one of the modules and you are logged on as a user with permission to use the searches.	home-related-modules
View...	Links for viewing reminders (if enabled). Modifying this search list is not recommended.	home-view
Quick Reference	Add a phone and address to a contact Print a report for a contact Use the Relationship Map Keep my contacts updated Customize My InterAction settings Learn more about InterAction These links open topics in the InterAction Web Client help system.	home-how

These search list declarations are stored in the searchLists.xml configuration file, which is installed in the etc directory of the Application Server machine.

Before you edit one of these declarations, you should copy it into the localSearchLists.xml file in the local directory of the Application Server machine. In a typical installation, the local directory is C:\Program Files\LexisNexis\InterAction\AppServer\iahome\etc\local.

A complete list of XML tags that can be used in a search list declaration is available in Search List Declaration XML Reference. The following sections highlight how the tags are used in the out-of-the-box home page search list declarations:

Tags that Start a Search List
Defining Search List Items (Headings and Links) for the Home Page
Sample URLs for Home Page Links
Linking to Web Client Help Topics
Make a Copy of the Out-of-the-Box Search List to Edit

Tags that Start a Search List

All search list declarations in an XML configuration file must be nested within the searchListDeclarations Tag tag. After this tag, every search list starts with the searchList Tag tag. Providing a value for the id attribute names the list so that it can be referenced from other declarations. This essentially starts a new list. After the first searchList Tag tag, subsequent tags define headings and links. See searchList Tag.

For example, in the following code example, the first instance of the searchList Tag tag has the id attribute set to home-search. Therefore, it starts a new search list with this ID. The subsequent instances of the searchList Tag tag do not set the ID attribute, so they define new items in the list. The page method for the home page (home in the pages.xml file) refers to the home-search ID when placing the formatSearchList.jsp nugget on the page.

Starting a Search List and Defining Items — XML Examples

...

</searchList>

...

</searchList>

Defining Search List Items (Headings and Links) for the Home Page

You define search list items with the searchList Tag tag. See searchList Tag for details.

The searchList Tag tag identifies the following:

The text that will be displayed on the page. You set this with the label Tag tag.
The target URL for the link. You set this with the url Tag tag.

For example, the following code for the home-search declaration creates the link to the People search form:

Defining Search List Items

<label>People</label>

<url>$(PAGE_SERVER)/advanced-searches?defaultItemId=item5001&

usePersistence=false&proxyAccount=$(proxyAccount)</url>

</searchList>

Both labels and targets for links can include Application Server variables. When Web Client displays the text, these variables are replaced with their actual values. Since the home page does not have any contact-specific context, you really can only use the environment-related variables, such as userName.

You can use variables in both the label name and the URL destination. For details about using variables, see Using Variables for InterAction Information.

Setting the Link URL

The target for a link specified with the url Tag tag can be the address for another Web Client page or any other Web page that can be reached with a standard HTTP request.

When linking to a Web Client page, you can use the PAGE_SERVER variable instead of entering the complete name of your Application Server. You can also pass parameters to the page. For example, the following URL calls the advanced-searches page and passes three parameters:

defaultItemId=item5001

usePersistence=false

proxyAccount=$(proxyAccount)

Link URL

$(PAGE_SERVER)/advanced-searches?defaultItemId=item5001&usePersistence=false&proxyAccount=$(proxyAccount)

The parameters force the contact search page to go to the People search. For details about determining the URL for a Web Client page, see Web Client Page URLs. Also see Sample URLs for Home Page Links.

Sample URLs for Home Page Links

Most of the links you add to the home page fall into one of five categories.

Non-InterAction Sites

You can link to any Internet or internal intranet site. See the site you want to link to for the format of the URL.

Web Client Search Forms

Use the same format provided for the out-of-the-box links in the Search for nugget, but replace the ID with the ID of the form you want to open:

$(PAGE_SERVER)/advanced-searches?defaultItemId=item5001&

usePersistence=false&proxyAccount=$(proxyAccount)

For instance, change item5001 to item10013 to make the link open the Top Clients search form. You can see the ID for a search form in the Windows Client in the Manage Web Client Search Forms dialog box. Note that a link can only open search forms that appear in the top navigation.

Contact Type Lists

Every contact type in your environment is available from the Contact Types List page. However, it can be useful to put shortcuts to especially important lists right on the home page. The following URL displays a list of contacts assigned the contact type with the ID of 10 (the out-of-the-box Top Clients contact type).

$(PAGE_SERVER)/InterAction/contact-search-results?isProfile=true&

searchDescription=Top Clients&profileId=10005&contactTypeId=10

Note that the profileId=8 portion identifies a profile (the Client profile) that will be used for the summary pane. You can get the ID for a profile in the Windows Client in the Manage Web Client Profiles dialog box.

Marketing Lists

Linking to marketing list pages is similar to linking to contact types. The following URL displays a list of contacts in the Holiday Card list. Note that you need to provide the ID for the folder.

$(PAGE_SERVER)/mailing-list-membership?searchDescription=Holiday+Card&

folderId=2/-10017&proxyAccount=

Subsets of Lists

Search forms let users find a subset of contacts within a list, such as only clients that meet particular criteria. Some of these subset lists may be important enough to include as a link on the home page. This saves users from needing to enter the criteria to find the contacts. For example, you might want a link that displays the list of employees in a particular office.

The easiest way to determine this type of URL is to perform the search in the Web Client, then copy the resulting URL from the browser and change it as needed. For an example, see Shortcut for Determining the URL for a Web Client Page.

Web Client Help Topics

If there are particular Web Client help topics that would be useful to professionals in your organization, you can add links to them on the home page. For details about determining the URL for a topic, see Linking to Web Client Help Topics.

Linking to Web Client Help Topics

The Web Client provides an online help system to address common questions and tasks. The home page includes a series of links to specific topics within the help system.

You can add links to additional topics. Specify the following URL for the url Tag tag (all one line):

Linking to Web Client Help Topics

javascript:var remoteWin = IA_openWindow('$(HELP_URL)/TopicFilename.htm', '', 'height=550, width=700, location=no, menubar=no, resizable=yes, scrollbars=yes, status=no, titlebar=no, toolbar=no');

Replace TopicFilename.htm with the actual filename of the topic you want to link to. The other code in the URL is used to display the topic in a pop-up window. Be sure to enter the URL exactly as shown – the easiest way is to copy the URL for one of the existing help topic links.

Use the following steps to determine the filename for a given help topic:

Open the help and browse to the topic you want to link to. You can use the Help link on the Web Client page framework to open the help.
When the topic you want appears in the right-hand pane of the help window, right-click in the topic and choose Properties.
Note the Address (URL) listed in the properties dialog box. You will see something like the following:

http://bailey/IA_HELP/ad1015791.htm
The filename for the topic is the *.html part. In the example above, this topic’s filename is ad1015791.htm. Note that there may be a pound sign (#) or other additional text after the filename; you can ignore this.

Make a Copy of the Out-of-the-Box Search List to Edit

Note that you only need to follow this procedure once, before making any changes to a particular search list.

On your InterAction Application Server machine, locate the etc directory. In a typical installation, this is normally the following:

C:\Program Files\LexisNexis\InterAction\AppServer\iahome\etc
Open the file searchLists.xml in an XML editor.
Find the lines that begin declaration for the search list you want to edit. For a list of available search lists, see Home Page Search Declarations. The name of the search list will appear like the following:

<searchList id="home-search" template="searchList.xsl">
Copy the entire block of XML code for the search list. The declaration ends with the tag <\searchList>. Note that the declaration includes several nested <searchList> tags, so be sure to copy the entire declaration.
Open the file localSearchLists.xml and paste the menu declaration at some point after the opening searchListDeclarations Tag tag.
Update this copied version of the search list declaration with your changes.