This documentation supports the 21.05 version of BMC Helix ITSM. To view an earlier version, select the version from the Product version menu.

User interface change guidelines

You can change the user interface by changing data at the configuration level, and preserve these changes during upgrades. Menus that are displayed in the system can be extended by making changes to the back-end forms. For more information, see User-interface-object-designs.

If you are updating a view within the system to add new fields or rearrange how a view is laid out, make an overlay of the form and the view you are changing to preserve your changes during an upgrade.

An overlay of a view enables you to copy the out-of-the-box view and make changes to that view; however, during an upgrade, the application may change the base view. In this case, you need to merge your view changes back to the upgraded view of the form or merge the changes from the upgrade view to the overlaid view.

For a new view, you can add user interface widgets to:

  • Retrieve data from other forms
  • Change the layout structure of the data

Related topics

Customized-fields

Customized-buttons

Forms-change-guidelines

Customized-tooltips

Customized-process-flow-bar

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Best practice
We recommend that you follow these tips for the BMC Helix ITSM environment:

  • Carefully add new table fields to a view or a form to avoid potential performance impacts. Consider that a table should be refreshed only when the data is needed. Use a qualification that uses indexes for searching forms that have a big volume of data. The table must use data chunking to limit the rows that are returned as search results.
  • You can reduce the load on the primary forms by adding a new user interface workflow to a newly created form, and then adding a view field to the existing form that can load the newly created form. This way the changes are isolated from the existing form, and you get a better system performance. For more information, see User-interface-object-designs.
  • Avoid polling menus or active links to reduce potential performance impacts.
  • For the forms or views you add, use field IDs that are outside of the range reserved by BMC. For more information, see User-interface-object-designs.

Branding the interface using Skins

The goal of branding is to typically change the color scheme, icons, and background images to meet your corporate standards.

AR System provides the Skins feature that enables you to align an application with your corporate brand. Use Skins to make changes to the color scheme and to images on buttons. Skins are configured by using data. For more information about the Skins feature, see  Applying skins to form views. 

You can change the icons on the AR System Mid Tier login screen. Ensure that you do not change the CSS file that comes with AR System. We recommend that you change the images on the login screen by replacing the image that is referenced.

In the Mid Tier images directory, replace the login_image.jpg and login_logo.gif files with the files provided for the customer.

The reference to the files is as follows:
String login_img = "images/login_image.jpg";String logo_img = "images/login_logo.gif";