Personalisation

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Change the way Insight looks

The appearance of Insight can be easily changed and amended to suit your taste or school colour scheme. There are various sections of Insight that can be changed, and methods for applying these changes, which are described below.

Built-in colour schemes

Insight has a number of preset colour schemes which you can select from when running the service controller. On the Commit tab there is a drop down which allows you to select a theme. Chose one and then click Begin.

Theme 1.jpg Theme 2.jpg Theme 3.jpg
Blue Plastic

Metropolis

Blue Metropolis

Theme 4.jpg Theme 5.jpg Theme 6.jpg
Olive

Purple Grey

Red Wine

Theme 7.jpg Theme 8.jpg
Soft Orange

Web 2


Custom colour schemes

To create a custom colour scheme for Insight you will need access to the IIS server on which Insight is installed. You can take copies of existing files that affect the Insight colour scheme and then change them to suit your needs.

The appearance of Insight is defined by three separate files which affect different aspects of the appearance. The image below illustrates the areas of Insight that are affected by each file:

Insight customise help01.jpg

Colour Areas File
Red.jpg Background & workspace styles.css
Blue.jpg Header, footer, title and menu jquery-ui-1.8.custom.css
Green.jpg Grids ASPxGridView.skin & ASPxGridView.skin.bak


On the Insight server, browse to the Insight folder. You will need to create two new folders for your colour scheme. These two folders must have exactly the same name, which will also be the name of your colour scheme.

  • within the _Scripts\jQuery\css folder, create a folder with the name of your colour scheme
  • within the App_Themes folder, create a folder with the name of your colour scheme

Background & workspace (red section)

The design and layout of these elements are taken from a .css file. Go to the App_Themes folder and you will see folders for the existing Insight themes. Go into one of these folders then copy and paste the styles.css file into your own folder (INSIGHT\App_Themes\YourFolder)

You can then edit this .css file to make any desired changes.

Header, footer, title and menu (blue section)

The design and layout of these elements are defined by a jQuery file. Go to the css folder (INSIGHT\Scripts\jQuery\css) and you will see one folder for each of the existing Insight themes. Go into one of these folders then copy and paste the jquery-ui-1.8.custom.css into your own folder (INSIGHT\Scripts\jQuery\css\YourFolder)

You can then edit this .css file to make any desired changes.

Grid view changes (green section)

The grid outlines, column headers and tick boxes are all defined by .skin files. Go to the App_Themes folder and you will see folders for the existing Insight themes. Go into one of these folders then copy and paste the ASPxGridView.skin and ASPxGridView.skin.bak files into your folder (INSIGHT\App_Themes\YourFolder)

You can then edit these files to make any desired changes.

Further personalisation - jQuery

If you want to make further changes to the appearance of Insight you will need to go to the jQuery website at http://www.jqueryui.com/themeroller .

You can then go to the gallery to make amendments or create a new view and download the files to your computer, placing them in the relevant folder for your Insight colour scheme. You may need to rename the downloaded .css file, so that the version in the filename is exactly 1.8. For example if your downloaded .css file is named "jquery-ui-1.8.21.custom.css" you should rename it to "jquery-ui-1.8.custom.css".

The Insight team will not be able to assist with specific jQuery questions/issues.

web.config update

Once you have made all desired changes, you need to select your custom theme. To do this, you can either run the service controller and select from the drop-down list of themes (see above) or you can edit the web.config file.

To edit the web.config file, you will need to change the "Theme" setting:

From

     <setting name="Theme" serializeAs="String">
       <value>Metropolis</value>
     </setting>

To


     <setting name="Theme" serializeAs="String">
       <value>YourCustomTheme</value>
     </setting>


Refresh Insight by pressing CTRL & F5 or logging-in and out to see your changes.

Custom icons

There is a list of the icons used in Insight, in the "_Personalisation" folder on the IIS server (usually c:\inetpub\wwwroot\insight\_Personalisation\BuiltInIcons.txt )

This file is a list of built-in icons and buttons for menus and subjects. If you want to add your own icon for a specific menu item:

Ensure your image is a 32x32 PNG file 

Save it in this folder with the same name as the icon

For example, if you want to update the achievements icon ensure your image is called achievements.png

This file is a list of built-in icons and buttons for menus and subjects. If you want to add your own icon for a specific menu item:

  • Ensure your image is a 32x32 PNG file
  • Save it in this folder with the same name as the icon

For example, if you want to update the achievements icon ensure your image is called achievements.png

This option will allow amendments to the logo.

  • The logo file must be a Logo.png file, for example "School Logo.png", and store it directly into the _Personalisation subfolder on the main webserver (usually c:\inetpub\wwwroot\insight\_Personalisation).

Once everything is in place you will want to make the necessary change to the web.config file to apply the changes.

There are two methods to changing the school logo in Insight:

Method 1:

  • Log on to the machine that Insight was installed onto.
  • Browse to the INSIGHT folder - this is often found via C:\inetpub\wwwroot\INSIGHT or C:\inetpub\INSIGHT
  • Copy and paste your new school logo into the INSIGHT folder. The new image file must be named "logo.png" - if this file already exists then overwrite or move it.

Method 2:

  • Log on to SIMS and go to Focus > School > School Details
  • Update the school logo by clicking on the magnifying glass button in section 1 on this screen.
  • Log on to the machine that Insight was installed onto.
  • Browse to the INSIGHT folder - this is often found via C:\inetpub\wwwroot\INSIGHT or C:\inetpub\INSIGHT
  • Check that there is not a file in the INSIGHT folder called "logo.png" - if there is then rename, move or delete it.


  • Open the Insight web.config file (usually c:\inetpub\wwwroot\insight\web.config) and amend the logo name to the name of your .png file, for example 'School Logo.png', by amending the data between the 'value' fields, here is an example.

From

     <setting name="Logo" serializeAs="String">
       <value>aboutblank.png</value>
     </setting>

To

     <setting name="Logo" serializeAs="String">
       <value>School Logo.png</value>
     </setting>
  • Refresh Insight by pressing CTRL and F5 or logging-in and out then you will see your changes.

Change the way Insight works

_Personalisation files will allow you to make more specific changes within Insight which cannot be put in place through either the role option settings or preference settings. Sometime it is the case that these changes may only be required for your school.

All the files will initially have an extension of 'unused'; in addition to any actions below you will need to remove the 'unused' extension to start using the files.

Here are explanations of various _Personalisation options used in Insight.

aspect.priorities

This folder allows you to make amendments to the priority of Aspects and the priority of the Subject and Year Group within the Aspect.

In order for this to work the settings for the role must be set correctly. Within subjects ensure the setting for 'use_Personalisation\aspect.priorities file' is set to 'on'.


autosynch.answer

This file holds the settings for an automatic synchronisation of data from SIMS to be performed once a day just after midnight.

In order for it to work you have to have KeepAlive installed and running. To check this run the ServiceController.exe possibly on your shared drive in the Insight folder. Open the 'Services' option and you can check the current state of Keep Alive. Close the window once you have finished checking.

If Keep Alive is running it will "prod" the web site to keep the application loaded in memory on the web server every 10 minutes. At the first check it does after midnight, providing this file exists, the values within it are correct and set as follows:

<answer activated="true" role="Standard" invalidate-existing="true" purge-ad="false" />

then the synchronisation will run.

blacklisted.aspect.resultsets

This folder allows you to add the aspect name and the resultset name that you do not want to see by blacklisting them.

notice.footer and notice.header

These two folders allow you to setup the header and footer for emails initiated through Notice composer.

sessiontimes.csv

This file holds the timings for registration periods during a week and any specific session times required.

SIMS will let you set the registration period timings but only once so, if these are incorrect using this file within Insight will allow you to amend and overwrite the SIMS version.

You can see this in the Timetable and Snapshot menu items under attendance.

In order for this to work the settings for the role must be set correctly. Within snapshot ensure the setting for 'show lesson times' is set to 'on'. You may also have to re-start Insight.

snapshot.(snapshot name).bolton

This file allows for additional web pages, external or from within _Personalisation, to be added to the snapshot page.

In this file add the following information:

  • An appropriate title between the 'title' fields
  • The link to the website between the 'url' fields
  • The height of the item between the 'height' fields (this will be the height of the item when displayed within snapshot).

TimetableJump.aspx and TimetableJump.rar

This file allows you to jump to an external application page, for example a page about a specific subject. You will need to make sure the path in this folder and the SIMS data is correct.


WML2HTML.xsl

If you choose to use this file it will replace the ASPOS option in SIMS.

However, a more up-to-date method to do the same task is to use Batch PDF conversion within the Manage menu option in the Insight application.