HOWTO: Customize Document Layouts

Document type layouts are used to display a document's metadata in Web UI. A document layout is structured with document type properties, assembled with several UI elements such as sections, cards, columns etc.

A given document type can have multiple layouts: a create and edit layout to set its schema fields when creating or editing the document, a view layout to display field values and any other layouts according to the application(s) where these are used. In our previous metamodel driven UI, these were known as modes and a single layout definition could be rendered in different modes.

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a document type layout with Studio Designer from a document type created in Studio Modeler and how to add a icon to it.

Hyland University

Watch the related course on Hyland University:
Course on Document type layouts.

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Prerequisites

The Nuxeo Web UI addon is installed on your instance.

Create a Contract Document Type

Create a custom document type named "Contract" that will hold specific metadata for a contract: contract owner, starting date, policy.

1. In Studio Modeler, under Configuration, click on the Content Model section, then Document Types. Click on the New button.

2. Fill in the creation form as follows and click on Next:

   • ID: Contract
   • Extends: File
   • Label: Contract

   • Description: Contract document type for internal use.

     Your document type is created.

3. Fill in the Definition tab:
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4. Select an icon for your contract document type:
   • A .png icon for the Icon and Large Icon fields
   • A .svg Icon for the SVG Icon field.
     From Select Resource buttons, you can select any SVG file available in the Studio project resources or upload your own.
5. Fill in the Schema tab with the following metadata:
   • A field owner as a String
   • A field policy as a String
   • A field reminder as a Date
   • A field start as a Date
   • A field endDate as a Date
     You should end up with the following screen:
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Once you are all set, click on Configure Layouts at the top-right of the screen to go the Designer side.

Create a New Layout

When configuring a document type, you need to create all layouts in the Studio Designer in order to display the relevant properties.

1. Click on Configure missing layouts to create automatically the default layouts based on the document type.
2. Modify and/or delete fields as you need on each layout to fit your needs.
3. Go to your Create layout. In CATALOG, on the right, select File > content:blob > view and drag and drop the element in the main view.
   You now have an upload button on your document layout.
4. Click on Save.

You should end up with something like this:

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You now have a document type ready to be used on your Web UI interface!

Technical Overview

In Nuxeo Web UI, these different layout/mode combinations have been materialized into individual elements, meaning each layout element is bound to a given document type and built for a specific use case. This enables developers to leverage any custom elements they see fit when building their layouts with explicit binding between fields and elements properties - thus doing without the mode handling widget abstraction.

By simply following a convention that maps a document type to a set of pre-defined element names, according to the different use cases (modes), our application can dynamically load and instantiate the appropriate element for a given document.

Regions of the UI which require configurable document layouts rely on custom container elements to handle the loading and instantiation of the appropriate layout elements for the given use case, for instance the default tab has two configurable regions by default:

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1. the view layout which usually displays an inline preview of the document and
2. the metadata layout which displays the document's metadata.

Each of these regions is defined by a generic layout container element which will import and render the specific layout element for the given document type, in this case nuxeo-document-view will rely on nuxeo-<doctype>-view-layoutand nuxeo-document-metadata will use nuxeo-<doctype>-metadata-layout, where <doctype> is the lower case document type (i.e. folder, note, picture, etc.).

These specific document layout elements are loaded by convention from a /nuxeo.war/ui/document/<doctype> folder and the element naming convention adopted is nuxeo-<doctype>-<mode>-layout.html where mode describes the use case and matches the layout name (i.e. create, view , edit, import, etc):

/ui
  └──── document
    ├─── <doctype>
    |  ├── nuxeo-<doctype>-<layout>-layout.html
    │  └── ...
    └── ...

The following table lists layout elements used by Nuxeo Web UI:

Element	Layout
1. nuxeo-document-view	nuxeo-{doctype}-view-layout	×
2. nuxeo-document-metadata	nuxeo-{doctype}-metadata-layout	×
3. nuxeo-document-edit	nuxeo-{doctype}-edit-layout	×
4. nuxeo-document-create	nuxeo-{doctype}-create-layout	×
5. nuxeo-document-import	nuxeo-{doctype}-import-layout	×

When instantiating and stamping these layout elements, a document property will be set to the current document and the layout is expected to update accordingly. The importing and stamping of these elements, executed by container, is simply:

this.importHref(this.resolveUrl(layout + '.html'), function() {
  // create the element
  var el = document.createElement(layout);
  // append it to the parent
  this.appendChild(el);
  // setup data binding
  el.document = this.document;
},

By building these elements with Polymer, developers can simply declare this document property and rely on native data binding support to bind document fields to the the template.

Since these document layouts are regular custom elements, developers have no limitations whatsoever in terms of HTML template, CSS styling or JS logics and are free to leverage any third party libraries or elements when building their own.

Layouts created and managed by Nuxeo Studio however will rely on introspection of the HTML and JS in order to provide validation and tooling support and will include some extra metadata, in the form of HTML attributes and/or JSDoc annotations.

The following is a sample definition of what an edit layout element for a MyDoc document type would look like, including Nuxeo Studio generated metadata:

<dom-module id="nuxeo-mydoc-edit-layout">
  <template>
    <!-- Custom CSS -->
    <style>
      *[role=widget] {
        padding: 5px;
      }
    </style>

    <!-- A paper-input widget bound to 'dc:title' -->
    <paper-input role="widget" value="{{document.properties.dc:title}}" label="Title"></paper-input>

    <!-- An input of type date bound to 'my:date' -->
    <div role="widget" class="item">
      <label>My date</label>
      <input type="date" value="[[document.properties.my:date]]">
    </div>

    <!-- Any HTML -->
    <img src="assets/imgs/logo.png">

  </template>

  <script>
    Polymer({
      is: 'nuxeo-mydoc-edit-layout',
      properties: {
        /**
         * You can use either @schema or @doctype annotation in your model.
         * Use to provide validation and auto completion of document properties.
         * @doctype MyDoc
         */
        document: {
          type: Object
        }
      }
    });
  </script>
</dom-module>

Configuring Document Creation

When configuring document types, there are two more contributions that have to be made in order for them to be properly displayed in the document creation wizard: add a custom icon and a custom label for each type.

The icon must be contributed to /nuxeo.war/ui/images/doctypes, named after the format {doctype}.svg. Labels must be added to the message files under the format label.document.type.{doctype}. In both cases, doctype must be the lower case doctype id.

You can prevent a doctype from being created via document creation wizard by adding to it the HiddenInCreation facet.

Doctypes can also be prevented from being imported even if they can be created, through the window.nuxeo.importBlacklist array, which holds all the doctypes that cannot be created. You can simply add or override this array to fit your needs. One could prevent the Workspace, Folder, OrderedFolder and Collection doctypes from being imported on the Web UI by deploying the following as a WebResource:

window.nuxeo.importBlacklist = [
 'Workspace', 'Folder', 'OrderedFolder', 'Collection'
];