Hacker's Guide to ARIS?

Stefan,

I'm with you on the hacking to modify things within the BizServer and BizPubServer to do what my company wants done with our ARIS implementation. The amount of customizations that I've made over the last few months have benefited me from posting queries to this list, where I've received so much information.

I, too, feel there is something missing in documentation around administering and customizing the ARIS system. I've read the two Rob Davis books, which give some information, yet not specifics on the many things that we've done to our install. We've even created custom reports that required our own researching to figure out how to do that by posting queries to another subgroup in the ARIS Community.

Maybe "we" (the users) should get together and write a Hacker's Guide to ARIS with our useful tips. It sure would be helpful as I'm sure some of you out there have done things I've yet to figure out.

If anyone's interested, feel free to drop me a personal email at jackie.damrau@t-mobile.com.

Jackie and Stefan,

thank you for bringing up this topic. I heavily agree with you that there is something missing like a "Hacking ARIS" guide. That's one important reason why we created ARIS Community. We hope that more people post their hacks and that others benefit from it.

We are very open to any initiatives creating such content. Let me know if we can support you here!

Stefan,

Maybe you can share how to change logo in ARIS web publication?

Is this something you managed to do?

Hanna,

To change the logo, we used PhotoShop to save our corporate logo as LogoL.wmf and LogoL.emf fle. Then for ARIS Business Publisher, we went to this location:

ARIS71\BPServer\tomcat\webapps\businesspublisher\reports\common

and renamed the existing file to LogoL_ids.wmf(.emf) and then copied in our LogoL.wmf(.emf) files.

For ARIS Business Architect, we found the location where the same LogoL files resided, renamed, and copied our files. All began working.

Hope this helps.

 Sebastian,

well, I guess there is considerable knowledge on your side as well :D

E.g. it would be cool if the log file effectiveSettings.log in xml (which is good to have AND a good data format ;-) would, for each entry, have a short description how to modify this setting item. At the moment, I am wondering where the email address in

<mailservice wait_time="500" mail_check_intervall="5000" count_before_wait="50" adress="adminservice@yourcompany.com" />

is set.

Somehow, the windows search only finds this file when I look for "adminservice@yourcompany.com"...

Stefan

Uh Stefan, I'm not the admin expert. If you got questions about ARIS method, I'm your contact, but I'm not so much into those configuration stuff. But lets wait and see if someone else jumps in!

 This is very much OK, Sebastian!

On the other hand, you are among the closest here to the high chambers of ARIS wisdom. But let's see what other rogue ARIStas have to say :D

Stefan:

The implementation of the ARIS BizServer and ARIS BizPublisher Server is very well documented in the ARIS Server Installation (ASI) course that yours truly wrote.

I am in the process of updating it to cover SP5 & SP6, (since SP6 will be only to document previously undocumented features).

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me either in this forum or directly.

Yours Truly,

Matt Bagley

Well -- Very glad to see this discussion topic, which the current available documentation either do not cover adequately or is not easy to access / infer.

Sebastian -- If these useful tips are to be extracted from user discussions, you may consider adding some "Special" tag to all such discussions & making them accessible as part of ARIS HELP discussions in this forum... That'll provide an easy access to these rather than having to depend only on searches -- till the time Matt (or other appropriate person) update the IDS guides with that info :-)

Jackie -- Appreciate you volunteering to help us all based on your learnings.. Found few of your threads not updated with results yet -- incase you had acted on the suggestions received, could you update those thread on whether the suggestions helped or not...

You had also mentioned about modifying the LogoL file for Business Architect -- My windows search "*LogoL*" on the entire drive where Architect is installed returned no results... Could you provide more insight on where this file will be for ARIS Business Architect? (fyi.. We use v7.1)

Regards,

Shankar

Hi Shankar,

using some kind of keyword is indeed a very good idea. I think there are 2 possible ways to go:

1. On request, I change the subject (i.e. title) of a post adding something like [ARISHACK] at the beginning.
2. Anyone thinking he found an article, tags the article using the tag "arishack".

Personally, I would prefer the second option, because it doesn't rely on a central bottleneck (i.e. me).

What do you think?

Shankar, I've looked through my threads and see where I have updated with as much information as I have had available. A few have not been resolved internally yet. If you can point me to a specific thread you feel I have not answered, I'll see if we've resolved it.

Sebastian, I like your idea of addting an article tack, "arishack". I'll add that to my threads now.

Hi Sebastian, Your 2nd suggestion of adding "arishack" as tag should meet this need. Appreciate quick response & action :-)

Hi Jackie -- I was referring to your thread on activating the symbols but now realize that its not yet resolved to be updated. Could you respond on the other query of mine (pasting below)

You had also mentioned about modifying the LogoL file for Business Architect -- My windows search "*LogoL*" on the entire drive where Architect is installed returned no results... Could you provide more insight on where this file will be for ARIS Business Architect? (fyi.. We use v7.1) ==> In other words, how could the Header / Footer / Logo of the Report scripts in Business Architect be changed?

Thanks in advance !

Shankar,

For the "Activating Symbols" thread, the suggestion given was not one that we can implement. Therefore, I have chosen not to respond. We're currently upgrading our servers and soon our clients to Service Release 5 with the hopes that this will resolve the problem. If not, I'll continue researching differences which may be down to laptop configuration.

For the LogoL modification, I'm going to post the update there now. We've had other work taking place that prevented me getting that information.

For replacing the IDS Scheer logo with your own corporate logo, here's what we used PhotoShop to save our corporate logo as LogoL.wmf and LogoL.emf fle.

In ARIS Business Publisher (for v7.1):

1. Navigate toARIS71\BPServer\tomcat\webapps\businesspublisher\reports\common
2. Rename the existing file to LogoL.wmf(.emf) to LogoL_ids.wmf(.emf)
3. Copy your corporate logo .wmf(.emf) files to the \common directory
4. Rename it as LogoL.wmf and LogoL.emf

In ARIS Business Architect (for v7.1):

Use the same steps above, except place the new LogoL.wmf and LogoL.emf files in the following locations:

• ARIS71\server\Reportserver\basic
• ARIS71\server\templates\script\basic
• ARIS71\server\templates\scriptservice\common

This is what we did. Depending on your installation, the locations may be different.

 Hi Hanna,

do you mean the logo on the home page of business publisher exports?

Please see my reply to this topic

The graphic file that is rendered by the default layout is

%arishome71%\BPServer\tomcat\webapps\businesspublisher\layouts\default\images\bpLogo.png

Either you replace it with your own logo

or you add your own graphic file to the same path and change the link target in

%arishome71%\BPServer\tomcat\webapps\businesspublisher\layouts\default\topnav.jsp

Please take care to backup the original files before changing anything.

Regards, Martin

 Hi all,

... or you just search for nice pics to modify :D

Which is how I came across the background image(s) of BizPublisher (analogous subdirs for the other layouts)

%arishome71%\BPServer\tomcat\webapps\businesspublisher\layouts\default_old\images\bgleer.jpg

You could also use 

%arishome71%\server\template\htmlgen\multi_lingual_pages.html

to modify the initial page Architects/Designers see with whatever you find useful. 

Default string resources can be adjusted in

%arishome71%\BPServer\tomcat\webapps\businesspublisher\layouts\default_old\properties

And, of course, I think backups are for sissies - of course, only the manual ones :D

hth,

Stefan

Hi folks, we just created a new group for discussions around ARIS report and macro usage and programming. Please join this group in case you are interested in those topics!