03/08/2010

How to hide the standard Quickr branded footer

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Recently someone in the Quickr forum at IBM developerworks asked a common question, and the answer is not intuitive - but simple - so I thought I'd share here.

Out of the box, Quickr has a footer with a lot of links in it. Some links are useful - to a point - like the help link. Unfortunately, the UI of the built-in help is from a prior version of QuickPlace, but the information is up to date. Problem is, it's the same for everyone regardless of their role in the place. Meaning, it tells you how to upload custom forms, which is inappropriate help content for a "Reader." Most companies end up writing their own help, or provide training, or just let people figure it out.

Some of the other links are just a geekfest - DeveloperWorks, Wikis, etc. that average users will never need to visit. So a common question, the one that came up on the forums, is how do you hide the footer?

One way is to hack the theme on the file system or in resources.nsf. It's a common mistake to do this, since any hotfix or upgrade will kill your work. Some folks dig into haikucommonforms.ntf, and play with the JavaScript there. That's insanity. There are 535 subforms and 30 forms that make up the DNA of Quickr, and messing with that is a recipe for long maintenance windows for upgrades. I know, I've done it when it was absolutely necessary and a customer had to have changes (in the QuickPlace 7 days) that were impossible in any other way.

Starting with Quickr 8.1, however, there is something called an "extension library," essentially a way to extend to standard themes some functionality just by making changes to one file - which does not get overwritten in an upgrade. We at SNAPPS have used this to do several types of server-wide changes, including the aforementioned hiding of the footer. So as an example, here's how to do that:

Locate and modify the file quickr81_ext.js. This file is in the Domino\Data\Domino\html\qphtml\ins\quickr81\scripts directory

Add this:

var Quickr81LotusFooter = {
    init: function() {
       dojo.addOnLoad(
          function() {
             var el = dojo.byId("lotusFooter");
                 if (el) {
                     el.style.display = "none";
                        }
                 }
             )
        }
 }
Quickr81LotusFooter.init();


That's all there is to it. Once you save that file, the footer is gone, you don't even need to restart the server or http. Of course, it might be cached on a browser so you might need to flush that or restart it. Note that this ONLY works on the standard theme - if you've customized the theme, this file isn't loaded and it will not affect those places.

Now - there is a more elegant way of doing it by referencing other files of your own from this one, making Quickr very extensible with various options to change the UI, add or remove features, add in menu items, etc. but this simple example will get you started. I'll post another example soon showing the other method.

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