Page Design and Processing Considerations for WorkCenter Pages

WorkCenters have different characteristics from standard PeopleSoft components and pages. This section discusses design and processing differences that you should consider when you work with WorkCenters, WorkCenter starting pages, and pagelets.

The areas of the WorkCenter are organized in a left-to-right, or top-to-bottom fashion. The pagelet area on the left presents the navigation links for the WorkCenter. The target content area in the middle provides the work area of the WorkCenter. The optional Related Content frame, on the right or at the bottom, presents additional information related to the current transaction.

Starting Page Considerations

When you create a WorkCenter starting page, consider the following differences and page design recommendations, which accommodate those differences:

  • WorkCenter starting pages are determined by the menu item associated with the content reference that you select when you create a new WorkCenter.

    While the page that appears initially in the target content area can be any page, you might want to start with a summary page showing the status of the tasks to be completed in the WorkCenter. The Unified Navigation WorkCenter employs this approach. Alternatively, you might want to display the first task to be completed. WorkCenters that have designated an activity guide pagelet as the in-focus pagelet employ this approach. In addition, you could choose a WorkCenter dashboard as a starting page to display homepage pagelets on a special dashboard within the target content area.

  • Typically, the component should consist of only one page, but no tabs or page links should appear on the starting page.

    Deselect the Multi-Page Navigation check boxes on the Internet tab.

  • The elements that make up the tool bar and page bar are not applicable and should not appear on the WorkCenter starting page.

    Select the Disable Toolbar and Disable Pagebar check boxes on the Internet tab.

  • WorkCenter starting pages generally require no save functionality.

    Select the Disable Saving Page check box on the Use tab.

  • Do not use a search page as a WorkCenter starting page.

    If necessary, select a “dummy” record—one that has no keys or contains only one row of data—as the component search record on the Use tab.

    The INSTALLATION record is an example of a “dummy” search record.

Processing Considerations

Note these points about WorkCenter page processing:

  • WorkCenter pages, like homepages and dashboards in your PeopleSoft applications, use deferred loading to load pagelets by default. When a WorkCenter page uses deferred loading, each pagelet appears independently from one another. When the data for the pagelet has been loaded, the pagelet appears. (This default behavior can be overridden be setting the PTPGLTDEFERLOAD content reference attribute to false for a specific pagelet.)

  • WorkCenter pages and assigned pagelets support interwindow communication. Use the Interwindow Communication page to configure interactivity among pagelets that share a WorkCenter page.

    See Understanding Interwindow Communication.

  • WorkCenter pages can process contextual parameters that you include in the WorkCenter page URL. The WorkCenter template accesses the parameters and passes them to the pagelets, which use the values to determine the records to retrieve and display. For example, you can create a WorkCenter page with pagelets that display customer information. You can pass the customer ID to the WorkCenter page URL as a context parameter so that all pagelets retrieve and display information about the same customer.

    The context parameter, CONTEXTPARAMS, must use the NAME:Value format and be passed as a query parameter string. Use this format when you build the WorkCenter page URL: 

    http://myserver.example.com:8920/psp/ps/EMPLOYEE/EMPL/c/PTAL_ADMIN.PTAL_SAMPLE_PAGE.GBL?CONTEXTPARAMS=USERPROFILE:VP1& CONTEXTPARAMS=EMPLOYEEID:1242.

    Using the previous example URL, the WorkCenter template retrieves the query string parameters, which it then sends to each pagelet in the following query string format ?USERPROFILE=VP1& EMPLOYEEID=1242.

    When you develop WorkCenter pagelets, use the %Request.getParameter PeopleCode method to retrieve and make use of the context parameter values.

Page Loading Sequence

The parts of a WorkCenter page are loaded in the following order:

  1. Pagelet area.

  2. Pagelets by group starting with the default pagelet group. Within each pagelet group, the pagelets are loaded in the personalized sequence order.

  3. Target content area.