Customizing the User Logoff Page in Dashboard

By Emma Schwarz

When a user disconnects from a Business Intelligence Dashboard view by logging off, the Dashboard displays a standard logoff screen. You may not want to leave users at this screen, but would like to instead display a page of your choosing. For example, you might want to direct your users to an internal company Web page.

Customizing the logoff page can be easily accomplished by editing the file found at ibi/WebFOCUS/worp/conf/bid-config.xml, and replacing the standard logoff redirection with the URL for the Web page you would like to use.

Open the bid-config.xml file to edit it, and then search for the string logoff-success. You should see the following block of code:

<response-redirect request-context=
"logoff-success">
    <context-redirect url="&REDIRECT;
" hrefs-per-row="5">
      <href src="&MPV;" text="mpvHREFTextShort"
context-asset="true" localize-text="true"/>
      <href src="&GBV;" text="gbvHREFTextShort"
context-asset="true" localize-text="true"/>
      <href src="&LOGIN;" text="loginHREFTextShort"
context-asset="true" localize-text="true"/>
      <href src="&INDEX;" text="indexHREFTextShort"
context-asset="true" localize-text="true"/>
  </context-redirect>
  </response-redirect>

Comment out the context-redirect section by adding the lines "<!--" and "-->" to designate the beginning and end of the commented block. Then add a line within the response-redirect section that specifies which URL to go to. See the line in the code sample following this paragraph that begins with "<x-direct url". The URL parameter value designates the page to which the user is sent upon logoff.

<response-redirect request-context="logoff-success">
    <!--
    <context-redirect url="&REDIRECT;
" hrefs-per-row="5">
      <href src="&MPV;" text="mpvHREFTextShort"
context-asset="true" localize-text="true"/>
      <href src="&GBV;" text="gbvHREFTextShort"
context-asset="true" localize-text="true"/>
      <href src="&LOGIN;" text="loginHREFTextShort"
context-asset="true" localize-text="true"/>
      <href src="&INDEX;" text="indexHREFTextShort"
context-asset="true" localize-text="true"/>
    </context-redirect>
    -->
    <x-redirect url=
"www.informationbuilders.com"/>
  </response-redirect>

The URL parameter can point to any Web page available to your users. For example, you could set the URL to http://www.informationbuilders.com. Then, when a user clicks the logoff banner link, the user is disconnected from the Dashboard session, and the Information Builders Web page appears in the browser window.

What if you don’t want to completely replace the Dashboard logoff page but you want to change the link text or what URL the links direct the user to from the logoff page?

Instead of commenting out the context-redirect section, you can change the src parameter values so that you can guide the users to pages other than the default pages. Changes to the text parameter value also change the name of the link as it is displayed to the user. The file, as it is distributed, points to internal variables that the Dashboard uses. The actual URL and text you want to use can be substituted, so you do not need to reference these variables.

Any change you make to bid-config.xml will be global for all users of all views built for a Dashboard installation. The file cannot be customized for a particular view.