If you are running Infor OS/H5 you have the possibility to create really nice homepages for your users. The homepages are the starting points for all roles, and one of the widgets you probably want to have on your homepage is the menu-widget. On the menu widget you can add links to M3 programs for example, but by using bookmarks you can make the links smart, and let them open the programs with predefined selections and searches.
Since the homepage is a part of Infor OS and not in the M3 core installation, the bookmark handling is a bit different than the one I described in one of my previous post. In that blogpost I showed you how to create internal bookmarks to use within M3. The bookmarks used for the homepage have a slightly different syntax, since they are the link between Infor OS and M3.
To get the bookmark link you start by opening the program, and select the correct sorting order, view, enter filters/selections/searches. When the program looks the way you want it to look when a user opens it, you can get your bookmark link by clicking on the bookmark icon in the upper right corner. When you bookmark the program this way the bookmark will show up in the bookmark widget on your homepage.
You can also find the bookmark link in the address field in the browser. If you remove everything before “?favoriteContext” you have the correct link.
The link looks like this:
As you can see, it is similar to the internal bookmark links, but it ends with a logical id, which is the path to the correct M3 installation (marked in yellow).
This link will open the supplier master showing only Swedish customers. You can see the selection in the link, marked in green. To make the link work for all companies if you have more than one in your database, you need to exchange the company number (marked in blue) to a variable. If you enter <CONO> instead of the fixed number, the program will open up for the company the logged in user has in MNS150.
If you want to create a menu on the homepage, you can use the menu widget. To make the links you add possible to move between environments you need to configure the widget as shown below, check convert to portable links.
There are three ways to add a link to the menu widget:
- Click on the plus sign in the menu widget
- Click on the three dots in the upper right corner of the widget, and choose add link
- Click on the three dots in the upper right corner of the widget, and choose add bookmark link
If you have created the bookmark by clicking on the bookmark icon in the program, you should use the last option, add bookmark link. When you chose that option you get a dropdown list with your bookmarks. Choose the correct one and save and you are good to go!
If you use the plus sign, or add link, you have to paste the link you got from the address field in you browser, into the URL-field.
When you configure the menu widget you need to use this way of working for all links to M3 programs, even if you just want to open a program without any specific data pre-populated, just using mforms://CRS620 won´t work from the homepage.
This blog post gives you some technical information on how to do the bookmarks, next time I will show you some ideas of how the homepage and its widgets can be used in a smart way :)