System Administration / ARCHIBUS System Administration / Mobile Apps Manager

Controlling the Display of the Requests portion of the Workplace Services Portal Menu (Manage Activity Types task)

You may want to control the items that display on the Workplace Services Portal main menu, which is divided into two sections:

Requests (defined in the activitytype table)
Information (defined in the afm_mobile_menu table)

The Activity Types table controls the menu items for the Requests portion of the main menu.

About the Mobile Action field

When you add a new mobile menu item or a new mobile activity type, you enter the Mobile Action field for the new item. The Mobile Action field helps the Mobile Workplace Services app to know which action to take when the user selects a menu item.

When the user selects the menu item, the app uses the Mobile Action to execute the corresponding feature. Thus, the value of the Mobile Action field must correspond to one of the values that the app has defined in the source code.

For example, in Workplace Portal, choosing the “Locate Employee” menu item, will trigger the LocateEmployee mobile action; or, choosing “Maintenance” will trigger the ServiceDeskMaintenance action.

Thus, when defining a menu item, the value entered in the Mobile Action field must correspond to a value in the list of actions defined in the source code of the app. When an application engineer wants to implement a new feature, the engineer has to add the new mobile action value in the list of action codes of the app, and implement the corresponding behavior menu item selection.

To change the list of Request tasks that appear on the mobile device

The Workplace Portal application works in conjunction with the following Web Central applications: Space Inventory & Performance, Personnel & Occupancy, On Demand Work, Service Desk, Hoteling, Reservations. Sites can remove request types (for example, hoteling requests, move requests) from the catalog of services if the site does not use the ARCHIBUS application that supports that type of request.

To do add or remove an item:

Load the System Administration / ARCHIBUS System Administration / Mobile Apps Manager / Manage Activity Types task.
For the item you wish to change, locate its record in the left frame.
In the right frame, edit the Security Group field.

To have the item appear to the mobile user on the menu, complete this field with WORKSVC-MOB.
To remove the item from the menu, clear WORKSVC-MOB from this field.

On the mobile device, the mobile user must reset background data sync flag and restart the Workplace Services Portal app in order to see the changes to the menu.

Out of the box, it is not possible to provide each user with a set of tasks specific to their work; for example, if a user is not authorized to request moves, you cannot omit this task from the mobile device for this specific user. Instead, you run the above procedure to remove a menu item for all members of the WORKSVC-MOB security group.

To change the appearance of the Request portion of the menu

For the Requests portion of the menu, you can change the following by editing the Activity Types table:

display order
icon
task title
task description

To change the appearance of a Request item:

Load the System Administration / ARCHIBUS System Administration / Mobile Apps Manager / Manage Activity Types task.
For the item you wish to change, locate its record in the left frame.
In the right frame, edit the fields controlling display order, icon, title, or description.

On the mobile device, the mobile user must reset background data sync flag and restart the Workplace Services Portal app in order to see the changes to the menu.

To change the appearance of an information item, such as View my Reservations, use Web Central's System Administration / Mobile Apps Manager / Manage Mobile Menu task.