Drop Zones to Isolate Customizations on Fluid Pages

Configurable Drop Zone, allows users to add fields to pages without customizing the component of page definition. The newly injected fields are considered and processed as a part of the main page. 

Pre-requisites:  Fluid Dropzone: PeopleTools 8.57

Important points to note:

1.       Subpage are created by the customer in Application Designer. Nothing particularly special about these subpages and you can place all the usual fields, buttons, frames, group boxes, etc.

2.       Fields added to your subpage become an intrinsic part of the component buffer at runtime.  This is a powerful feature especially when combined with Event Mapping.

3.       In case of fluid, the Drop Zones exist at Level 0.  Any tables added to your subpage will appear at this level and will be automatically saved and updated by the component processor in the usual manner. Grids and Scroll areas can be added to your subpages but you must add a Horizontal Rule object at the end of your subpage to reset the Level back to 0.

4.       Record field PeopleCode defined on your subpage will execute as part of the events in the component processor flow. If your implementation requires other scenarios or PeopleCode events, (for example, page Activate, PreBuild, PostBuild, component record, or component record field events), then you should use PeopleCode event mapping to avoid customizing delivered components and pages.

5.       Unlike when a subpage is added directly as a page control on a main page definition, with this sort of dynamically injected subpage you cannot perform a record name substitution (that is, identify a from record on the subpage and a to record from the main page).

6.       The fields from your subpage that are dynamically added to the component buffer at runtime are not available in the component’s search record.

DROP ZONE ON FLUID PAGE

If we look at Employee Self Service Personal Details Address, there are 3 drop zones on this page.

On HR_EE_ADDR_FL Component, 3 drop zones are:

•  Top and Bottom of the Edit Page (the secondary page that opens when editing Addresses)
• Top and Bottom of the Lookup Page
• Top, After Home and Bottom of the Address Page

Step 1: Create custom Fluid subpage with customizations to implement and add a groupbox as a container that encompasses the entire subpage. All other page elements on this subpage must be enclosed within this container

Step 2: Configure DropZones

Navigation: PeopleTools > Portal > Configure Drop Zones

Add the name of your subpage where you want to see your customizations

If no subpage is configured to a drop zone it is considered to use related content by default. The ‘Used by Related Content’ value is reset or set based on if subpage is tagged or not.  (Unconfigured drop zones are ignored and not rendered at runtime)

DEMO