VIVO Documentation
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Overview
This page describes some tools and techniques that can help customizing your VIVO user interface.
Use the Developer Panel
Many of these techniques involve The Developer Panel, which is described in the VIVO Programmer's Notes section of the wiki.
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This is to remind you that developer options may slow down your VIVO, and should not be used in production.
Iterate your code more quickly
Reduce the VIVO build time
A full rebuild of VIVO may be necessary if you are changing the Java source code, or the contents of RDF files. However, if you are only making changes to the Freemarker templates, you can run the build script like this:
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After making your changes to the templates, you should perform a full build with unit tests.
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Don't restart VIVO until you need to
VIVO will detect changes to the templates without requiring a restart. However, you will probably want to defeat the Freemarker cache (see below).
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If you change any other types of files, you will need to restart VIVO after running the build script.
Defeat the Freemarker cache
As mentioned above, VIVO will detect changes to Freemarker templates. By default, however, VIVO will not detect the changes immediately. The Freemarker framework caches the templates that it uses, and won't even look to see if a template has changed until 1 minute after it was last read from disk. In a production system, of course, that makes the accessing much more efficient. When you are making frequent changes, it's an annoyance.
Use The Developer Panel to defeat the Freemarker cache.
Customizing listViewConfigs
Ted Lawless has written an open-source Python script to assist with viewing the output of a listViewConfig without having to rebuild the entire Vivo app.
Also, you can skip the unit tests when building VIVO, as shown in Reduce the VIVO build time. Unit tests do not apply to listViewConfigs.
Reveal what VIVO is doing
Insert template delimiters in the HTML
It's not always clear which template has created a particular piece of your HTML page. Templates include other templates, templates are invoked in custom list views, short views, etc. You can use The Developer Panel to insert comments in the HTML that tell you where each template begins and ends.
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<body >
<!-- FM_BEGIN identity.ftl -->
<header id="branding" role="banner">
<h1 class="vivo-logo"><a title="VIVO | connect share discover" href="/vivo">
<span class="displace">VIVO</span>
</a></h1>
<nav role="navigation">
<ul id="header-nav" role="list">
<!-- FM_BEGIN languageSelector.ftl -->
<!-- FM_END languageSelector.ftl -->
<li role="listitem"><a href="/vivo/browse" title="Index">Index</a></li>
<li role="listitem"><a href="/vivo/siteAdmin" title="Site Admin">Site Admin</a></li>
<li>
<ul class="dropdown">
<li id="user-menu"><a href="#" title="user">Jim</a>
<ul class="sub_menu">
<li role="listitem"><a href="/vivo/accounts/myAccount" title="My account">My account</a></li>
<li role="listitem"><a href="/vivo/logout" title="Log out">Log out</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</nav><!-- FM_END identity.ftl -->
<!-- FM_BEGIN menu.ftl -->
</header>
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Overview
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