Developing User Inboxes: an Overview

A User Inbox is either an HTML page or Java™ applet that provides a workflow participant or Tracker (see FileNet Process Tracker) with notifications regarding work items assigned to them.

The notifications in the User Inbox include information and associated attachments, provided to the User Inbox from a user queue or work queue. Common customizations include building a User Inbox UI, displaying a list of queues, querying for and displaying queue contents, and opening a Step Processor or Tracker assignment.

For complete information, see Developing a User Inbox and, for HTML development tools, see Developing an HTML Step Processor in the Web Application Toolkit.

For information on developing a User Inbox for ASP/ASP.NET environments, see the accompanying documentation for the FileNet® Web Services and FileNet Open Client distributions.

The following table provides a description of the fundamental approaches to User Inbox development:

Customize

Changes

Description

User Interface Modify the look and feel of the user interface.
  • HTML User Inbox

    Modify/customize the View UI JavaServer Pages (JSP), UI Module (JavaBean), XSL stylesheet, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheet). Remember to verify that the Event JSP redirects control to the appropriate corresponding UI JSP page.

  • Java User Inbox

    Develop your own User Inbox user interface.

  Modify the page layout or structure of the User Inbox.
  • HTML User Inbox

    Create/use an object (in the HTML header section) for the HTML page. In the layout section, the WcmUI.render method is called for each UI module that generates HTML output from XML. The WcmUI.render method in turn calls the individual render methods of the UI modules. Override the base UI module methods to customize the presentation. In addition, you can create custom tab bars, tool bars, and other UI elements and place them into a containment module using the appropriate UI module's methods.

  • Java User Inbox

    Modify your existing layout and structure code.

  Add new user controls, modify or hide existing controls.
  • HTML User Inbox

    Modify/customize the Event JSP page to call the controller methods to handle user actions invoked from an HTML page and redirect the control to the corresponding UI JSP page.

  • Java User Inbox

    Develop your own controls.

Deploying a Java User Inbox

See Deploying Java Applications.