The “Simplified UI” introduced along with Siebel 15 about which quite a bit has been already written and said lacks out-of-the-box the traditional Application Menu. The Simplified UI has been introduced to, well, simply the UI. More specifically as an effort to make the application easier to use and create a consistent user experience with other Oracle applications which leverage the same “simplified” design.
The obvious target are tablet deployments. The bigger icons and less clutter definitely makes it easier to navigate the UI. The Simplified UI boulders on the “traditional” Aurora UI introduced a bit more than 6 months back. Time flies. I kind of like the look and feel. But came to the conclusion that the UI has been simplified possible a bit too much for me. I really started missing the application menu.
As you might have guessed, the application menu in reality hasn’t gone. Why? Well, because any Siebel UI theme is just a style sheet and will work against exactly the same DOM. So surely, the application menu would still fly around in the DOM.
But technically speaking, this could change if you’d dive into the CRM Composer. CRM Composer allows you to use expressions on Web Templates, and hence the DOM could be presented differently depending on a selected theme. Think of it like this: with CRM Composer if the “Simplified UI” theme is selected, a web template’s expression such could use e.g. GetProfileAttr(“OUI_THEME_SELECTION”) = “THEME_SUI”) to dynamically filters items such as the application menu from the DOM, making it lighter and more agile.
And yes, there it is. The triggering CSS rule is “display: none;”. Life can be easy. Overriding the CSS rule and positioning it nicely is enough to get back a fully functional application menu. And it doesn’t look that bad neither if you ask me.
.applicationMenu {
display: inline-block;
padding-left: 50px;
}
And here you go.
Of course this override would need to be administered correctly as overriding stylesheet e.g. sui-theme-custom.css, stored in /files/custom/. Will spent a bit more time on this topic in a following post, since I have some troubles in Siebel 15 creating a custom theme. Following the usual practice, it downloaded my theme-sui-custom.css. But along with that also theme-aurora.css got downloaded which messed things up. Anyways, a quick hack would be to modify the theme-sui.css… Fair enough for prototyping!
– Jeroen
