Customizing Pages
Polaris PowerPAC and Polaris PowerPAC Children’s Edition are based on ASP.NET programming. All .aspx and .ascx files are directly editable, but you should back up your changes to preserve them from being overwritten when the application is updated and reinstalled. You should be familiar with and have coded ASP.NET in C#.
For Polaris PowerPAC, the files are located in Polaris/PowerPAC/library. See Polaris PowerPAC Pages Reference for a list of pages and how they are used.
For Polaris PowerPAC Children’s Edition, the files are located in Polaris/PowerPAC/children. See Polaris PowerPAC Children's Edition Pages Reference for a list of pages and how they are used.
Important:
Back up your changes to preserve them from being overwritten when the application is reinstalled or upgraded.
Site Master Page
Beginning with Polaris 5.2, PowerPAC uses an ASP.NET master page called site.master which resides in the PowerPAC application root directory. All common <HEAD> elements from the individual *.ASPX PowerPAC pages are now in this shared master page. This shared master page ensures consistency in style and layout across pages, and prepares PowerPAC for future updates. You do not need to customize the <HEAD> element on individual pages.
Note:
You can include a custom version of site.master in the /custom directory. See Customizing Layouts.
CSS and JavaScript References
Beginning with Polaris 5.2, all references to external style sheet and static JavaScript files are located in user control files called /usercontrols/headassets.ascx and /usercontrols/footerassets.ascx. Alternate versions of these files are used by pages associated with PowerPAC Community features; they are called /usercontrols/headassetscommunity.ascx and /usercontrols/footerassetscommunity.ascxThe list of style sheets and JavaScript files can be edited in place.
Polaris PowerPAC Accessibility Tags
Polaris PowerPAC pages include tags to improve accessibility in the following ways:
- ALT tags provide text equivalents for inline images.
- “Skip navigation” links are included at the top of each PowerPAC page.
- Table header <TH> tags distinguish column headers for data tables, such as those displayed on patron account pages.
Although these features are not generally visible when the pages are displayed, they improve the experience of patrons who use screen readers. If you customize PowerPAC pages, you will likely want to retain these features.
User-Defined Templates
For Polaris PowerPAC, you can use a template to construct your custom pages. Custom pages based on the template can reside in any PowerPAC folder, and the page directive (first line of the custom ASPX page) does not need to be updated whenever PowerPAC is upgraded.
To create a custom PowerPAC page from the template, copy /Custom/CustomPage-template.aspx to any file name with an *.aspx extension in any folder within PowerPAC, typically in the /Custom/ folder. Then add any custom HTML in the commented area of the page.
Note:
Beginning with Polaris 5.2, the CustomPage-template.aspx file uses the master page design. If you have created custom *ASPX files in previous version of Polaris, they should still work as is, but Polaris encourages you to switch to the master page design. See Customizing Layouts. When you upgrade to Polaris 5.5, update your custom pages to follow the Polaris 5.5 version of the template.
Note:
Certain pages in the library\userdef directory are intended for direct editing so that you can easily insert your library’s custom information. These include ud_events.ascx and ud_policies.ascx. You can add upcoming events and library policies to these pages just by inserting the appropriate text and formatting your text with basic HTML tags. Be sure your additions are responsive. Add text to the Events page
Adding Web Parts to Custom Pages
If you create a custom page from the template, you may want to set the PageID value so that the appropriate web parts are displayed in the dashboard. For a list of PageID values, see Standard PAC Pages Reference.