Concepts

Tasks

Reference

Planning Your Customization Requirements

When you create object model and UI customizations, you will need to maintain and upgrade them from time to time. Upgrading customizations can be a time-consuming process (see Customizations and Upgrades). For this reason, before you begin creating customizations, you should consider what types of customizations you might need and why.

Changing the Look and Feel of the System Without Customization

In addition, APM has some features that you can use to change the look and feel of the system without customizing it through the Customization Center:

•	Security: You can hide objects and views from certain groups of users, providing them a “custom” interface that only shows the items that they are allowed to access. See Security.

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Table configurations: You can change any table (MCLB) in the system so that it displays only the columns that you need and shows the data in the order that you need it. Users with the administrator privilege can create these “custom” tables for all of the users of the system. End-users can also create their own table configurations. See Table Configurations.

•	View bars, Toolbars, and Banners: Each user can hide unnecessary views, toolbars, or banners. You can do this for any object in the system that has a primary window (such as Site or Asset). See User Interface Navigation.

•	Shortcuts: If a user only needs to access one or two objects, you can create a shortcut to the objects on their desktop. When they run the shortcut, APM will open the object directly, allowing the user to bypass the Site view. See Creating a Shortcut from the Banner.

Planning and Recording Your Customizations

Once you have set up and worked with APM for a while, you might decide that you do need to create either object model or UI customizations. Before you begin customizing, you should plan the types of customizations that you need to create, who will create them, and when.

In addition to thinking through the customization process, you will be able to keep this plan as a record of your work. You should always keep a record of your customizations so that you have something to refer to when you need to maintain or upgrade the system. For this process, you can use a table similar to the following:

Object or Class Name	Customization Description	Customization Type (UI or OM)	Who	Due Date