As we discussed in Part 1 of this post, there are three categories of
NetScaler customizations:
1) Customizations that do not
require any rewrite policies/actions (“policies”) or source code modifications
(“modifications”),
2) Customizations that can be
accomplished using either policies or modification, and
3) Customizations that will most
probably need modification of the source code.
In Part 1, we focused
on the Default, Green Bubble, and X1 (the
"original") themes. In part 2, we will discuss the newest theme
- Receiver for Web UI (RfWebUI), which uses a completely new mechanism.
While the logon page looks like
the X1 theme:
... if you will be using the
RfWebUI theme, you can forget pretty much everything you've learned about
customizing the NetScaler logon page.
Let's begin with the location of
the logon page. When using the original themes, the logon page (index.html) was
served from the /netscaler/ns_gui/vpn/ directory. With the
RfWebUI theme, the file is now served from /var/netscaler/logon/LogonPoint/.
The good news is that since the page is now in the /var partition,
any modifications to the page (or copies of the logon page) are automatically
persisted across a reboot. No longer do you need to add lines to rc.netscaler to
copy modified files into the flash partition.
The next major change is how you
modify text. The portal wizard allows you to easily make changes to commonly
updated text. Let's say you wanted to change the labels on the logon screen.
After clicking OK at the bottom of the wizard, you will then
be prompted for the language you wish to use:
After clicking OK,
you will see the pages you can modify on the right-hand side of the page.
Click Login Page.
You are presented with the default labels for the page:
Let's modify them as follows:
Click Ok.
Finally, click Done.
Now, let's refresh the page (you may need to clear your cache).
If you've had experience
customizing the original NetScaler themes, at this point you are probably
thinking "Tell me something that I don't already know ... this is no
different than modifying any of the other themes"! Not quite ... The
portal wizard functions differently depending on which theme has been chosen.
For the original themes, the portal wizard would modify the values in the
appropriate XML file in the resources directory (e.g. /var/netscaler/logon/themes/<theme>/resources/en.xml).
The keys affected are located under the Partition ID of Logon. Now,
what if you wished to modify the text of the logon button above, which you
can't do from the portal wizard? No problem. In the same file, as few lines
down, we find:
<Property id="Log_On"
property="value">Log On</Property>
Simply change it to:
<Property id="Log_On"
property="value">Click to log on</Property>
... and then save the file.
Try that with a theme based on
RfWebUI and you will find that it doesn't work. In fact, if you look at the
en.xml file in the resources directory of a theme based on RfWebUI, you will
notice that the portal wizard did *not* modify ANY of the keys in that file.
What gives??
For RfWebUI-based themes, those
text changes are written to /var/netscaler/logon/themes/<theme>/strings.<language
code>.json:
The portal wizard writes all the
values on a single line. I would suggest placing each override on a separate
line for readability and maintainability. Also note that this "key":"value" format
differs from the XML format of the other themes.
In order to change other text
elements on the page, you will need to get the key to be
placed in the override file. The keys may be found in the
file /var/netscaler/logon/LogonPoint/receiver/js/localization/<language
code>/ctxs.strings.js. The key for the logon button is nsg_LogOnbutton.
Let's add an override for it in the above file:
Then save the file, and refresh
the page. In addition to clearing the cache on your PC, it may take 2-3 minutes
for the cache to be cleared on the NetScaler.
Now, let's try to add our own
custom text fields as we did with the X1 theme in part 1.
Here we come to another major
difference. In the original themes, we would:
- Add a <div> with
a unique id (either via a rewrite action/policy or a modified
gateway_login_form_view.js file),
- Add a string with the <div>'s
id to the XML file in the resources directory, and
finally
- Add a CSS selector with
the <div>'s id to the custom.css file in the
selected theme.
Note that everything is keyed
off the id of the <div>.
With RfWebUI-based themes, text
is keyed off of class names, and the class name must begin
with _ctxstxt_. So, to add the "authorized users only"
warning (see Part 1), we make a copy of the index.html file (let's call it custom.html),
and add our custom <div>:
We then add an entry with
the text into strings.en.json:
We also need to add style
information, but instead of adding it to custom.css, for RfWebUI-based
themes, it must go into theme.css. Here you can either use
the <div>'s id (if specified), or the class name, which is
required (include the _ctxstxt_ prefix).
We can test by browsing to
our custom.html file.
Let's not forget our footer ...
add another custom <div>:
Then add the text:
... and then the CSS:
Browsing to our custom page:
Our final step is to create a
responder policy and bind it to our AG vServer. This will automatically invoke
our custom page when we browse to the AG vServer FQDN:
> add responder action "Logon Page Redirect Action"
redirect "\"custom.html\"" -responseStatusCode 302
> add responder policy "Logon Page Redirect Policy" "HTTP.REQ.URL.PATH_AND_QUERY.CONTAINS(\"LogonPoint/index.html\")" "Logon Page Redirect Action"
> bind vpn vserver "AG vServer" -policy "Logon Page Redirect Policy" -priority 100 -gotoPriorityExpression END -type REQUEST
> save config
> add responder policy "Logon Page Redirect Policy" "HTTP.REQ.URL.PATH_AND_QUERY.CONTAINS(\"LogonPoint/index.html\")" "Logon Page Redirect Action"
> bind vpn vserver "AG vServer" -policy "Logon Page Redirect Policy" -priority 100 -gotoPriorityExpression END -type REQUEST
> save config
To remove the customizations,
simply unbind the responder policy.
Here’s a handy cheat-sheet
summarizing all of the above:
|
Original Themes
(Default, Green Bubble, X1)
|
Receiver for Web UI
(RfWebUI) Theme
|
Logon page directory
|
/netscaler/ns_gui/vpn/
|
/var/netscaler/logon/LogonPoint/
|
Updates to text
strings
|
/var/netscaler/logon/themes/<theme>/
resources/<language code>.xml
|
/var/netscaler/logon/themes/
<theme>/strings/<language
code>.json
|
String format
|
<String
id=”key”>Value</String> OR
<Property id="key"
property="property">Value</Property>
|
“key” : “value”
|
Custom text based on
|
<div> ID
|
class name (existing
keys are in /var/netscaler/
logon/LogonPoint/receiver/js/localization/
<language code>/ctxs.strings.js
|
CSS file
|
custom.css
|
theme.css
|
Thanks to the NetScaler
development team for their help, and especially Bidyut H.
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