Customizing applications

Use the application customizer to modify the provided user applications, such as to change the layout of the user interface or specify default options for showing results. You can create additional layouts for a user application or create your own user applications. For analytics applications, you can also create and customize dashboard layouts.

About this task

When you make selections in the application customizer, you can preview the effects of your changes. When you save the changes, you update the configuration file for the application. To apply the changes to your application, either restart the application or the Watson Explorer Content Analytics system.

Procedure

To customize an application:

  1. Open the application customizer.
    • If you use the embedded web application server, click Search Customizer or Analytics Customizer in the administration console.
    • If you use WebSphere® Application Server, enter the URL for the application that you want to customize, where MasterServer.com is the host name of the master server and port is the master server port, such as 9080:
      http://MasterServer.com:port/ui/search/customizer
http://MasterServer.com:port/ui/analytics/customizer
  2. Select the options that you want to customize.
    You can configure settings that apply to all applications in your configuration, such as logging levels, and application-specific settings such as the default layout for a user application. You can also customize each layout in a user application, such as the arrangement of widgets and their default settings.
  3. When you are satisfied with the selections that you made, save your changes to update the configuration file.
  4. To apply changes to your application, either restart the Watson Explorer Content Analytics system or restart the application. To restart the application:
    • If you use the embedded web application server, enter these commands, where node_ID identifies the search server:
      esadmin searchapp.node_ID stop
      esadmin searchapp.node_ID start

      To determine the node ID for the search server, run the esadmin check command to view a list of session IDs. Look for the node ID that is listed for the searchapp session.

    • If you use WebSphere Application Server, log in to the WebSphere Application Server administrative console, and then stop and restart the web application for the enterprise search application or content analytics miner.