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

You can change the icons used for any of the menu items. Some pages in Insight also show subject icons (such as timetable and parents evenings). Subject icons can also be changed if desired.

In the _Personalisation folder, there is a file called "BuiltInIcons.txt". This file contains a list of the names of the icons that Insight uses for each icon.

If you want to use a custom icon, then you will need a 32x32 PNG file of your new icon. Save a copy of the new icon in the _Personalistion folder and name the icon according the to names in the BuiltInIcons.txt file.

For example, if you wanted to use a new icon for the parents evenings menu item, you would save your 32x32 PNG file in the _Personalisation folder and name it "parentsevening_icon.png"

There are three methods which can be used to change the school logo in Insight.

Method 1 - SIMS

By default, Insight will take the school logo from SIMS. You can find and change the school logo in SIMS via:
Focus > School > School details

This will be overruled if the web.config file has been told to use a different file. See below for details.

Method 2 - web.config

You can upload a .PNG file to the Insight root folder on the IIS server and change the settings in the web.config file to use your chosen .PNG . This can either be done using the service controller or by manually uploaded the file and updated the web.config.

If you want to use the service controller then run the service controller and look for a logo option on the Commit tab. Click the browse button and select a .PNG file that you would like Insight to use for the school logo, then click Begin. The service controller will upload the file to the Insight root folder and make the appropriate changes to the web.config file.

Alternatively, you can upload the .PNG file to the Insight root folder yourself and then edit the web.config folder. You will need to change the "Logo" setting:

From

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

To

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

Change the way Insight works

The files in the _Personalisation folder allow you to make specific changes to Insight which cannot be put in place through either the role options or preference settings.

All the files will initially have an extension of '.unused'; in addition to any actions below you will need to remove the 'unused' extension for the file(s) to take effects.

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'.

assessments.charts

The AM charts page explains how this file is used to create charts showing pupils' Assessment Manager Grades.

autosynch.answer

This file is used to automatically synchronise Insight with SIMS and the Active Directory so that the list of Insight users is kept up-to-date. See the users page for more information.

blacklisted.aspect.resultsets

There may be specific aspect and resultset combinations that you never want to display in Insight. In the file you will need one line for each aspect/resultset combination that you want to blacklist. The name of the aspect should appear first, then a comma, then the name of the result set. For example:

End of Year Grade, Preliminary results

sessiontimes.csv

This file holds the timings for registration periods during a week and any specific session times required. If your session times in Insight are incorrect then you need to update this file.

At the top of the file there will be fourteen lines of text; one for the AM and PM session of each day of the week. The first line is Monday AM, the next is Monday PM, the next is Tuesday AM, and so on.

The lines should be formatted so that they show the start and end time of each session, separated by a comma. For example, a session that starts at 8:50 and finishes at 9:15 should be written as:
08:50,09:15

Below the fourteen lines at the top of the file, you can add additional lines for sessions with unusual timings, for example, when having an INSET day and the session is going to last longer than normal.

In this case, the line should be formatted with the date, AM or PM, then the start and end time, all separated by commas:
10/05/2015,AM,08:50,10:00

snapshot.bolton.xml

This file is used to add items to the Snapshot page in Insight. Each custom item needs to be created as a html page and saved in the _Personalisation folder. Once an item has been created, the snapshot.bolton file can be edited:

<root>
<title>Guidance</title>
<URL>"../_Personalisation/example.html"</URL>
<height>50</height>
</root>

The title will be shown on the snapshot page about the new item. The "example" part of the URL should be replaced with the name of the html file in the _Personalisation folder and the height is the number of pixels tall that the item will be. Items are always 300px wide.

Multiple snapshot.bolton files can be used by creating a new file and adding a number to the end of "snapshot" e.g. snapshot1.bolton.xml

WML2HTML.xsl

This file can be used to replace the ASPOS option within SIMS. However it is recommended that instead, you use the batch PDF operations feature within Insight.