What is the Lawson Portal Page?

This chapter explains how to use the Custom Page Designer component of the Lawson Design Studio to create custom pages.

A custom page is a front-end or entry point to Lawson (and other locations). When you create a custom page, you are creating a unique interface to Lawson. In other words, you are designing how Lawson looks and feels to a user.

You can create a custom page to provide an entry point to any location (not just Lawson). A location can be an Internet site or sites, your company's intranet, or anywhere else.

You can control the objects (navigation and content items) that shows in the custom page, where they show, and, in many respects, how they behave.

These are some examples of items that can be displayed in a custom page that you create with Custom Page Designer:

  • Web sites of any kind (for example, intranet and Internet sites, RSS sites)

  • Lawson reports. You can access the Lawson report utility to submit, print, and delete reports directly from a custom page.

  • Custom menus. You can change Lawson standard menus or create your own to launch from a custom page.

  • Queries to Lawson data (through the Data, Transaction, and Drill servlets) that launch from a custom page.

  • Add images or customized colors to a custom page.

  • Add custom messages using your choice of font styles to a custom page.

Uses of Lawson Portal Pages

This section provides a few examples of uses Lawson customers might have to create a custom page.

If you are a system administrator, you could create custom pages that are tailored to the needs of specific users. You might have, for example:

  • Users who require access to only one form. For those users, you could create a custom page that contains only the object (in this case, a formlet object) that gives the user access to the form.

  • Users who want to submit and print Lawson reports or data queries directly from Lawson Portal.

  • Users who require access to a few Lawson Portal objects but want to control where the objects reside on Lawson Portal. One way to do this is to create a composite for the objects that users can access. (A composite is an object made up of other objects.)

From a software developer's standpoint:

  • The Custom Page Designer provides ways to create custom pages that link URLs and data in various ways.

  • By interfacing custom JavaScript code with Lawson Portal objects, you can add interactivity in many ways.

There is virtually no limit to the applications of the Custom Page Designer. This chapter focuses on explaining how to use the Custom Page Designer toolbox objects.