Adding a localised Asset PrintView to your SMP console

Table of content

• Introduction
• Presenting the AssetPrintView page
• Installing the files
• Creating the right click action
• Using the right click action
• Conclusion
• References

Introduction

Asset Management Solution offers a print-preview (and download as word file) for a three specific asset types (Purchase Request, Purchase Orders and Invoices) however there is no possibility to custom-design a print form, for example to print out hand-over documents for cellphones or computer hardware.

In this document you will see how to create a custom action (right click) that will use single page to generate a printable web-page that can be localized and contain the selected asset data.

Presenting the AssetPrintView page

The AssetPrintview pages provide a framework to printout asset data from the comfort of the Symantec Management Console, in any form you may desire and in localized version that would suit your end-user base needs.

The solution uses Microsoft ASP.Net, with a form to display the data in nicely formatted manner (assetprintview.aspx), and a C# page to extract the data from the Symantec CMDB (assetprintview.cs). How the form is built will be discussed in another article [1], whilst the code-behind and localization class will be discussed in a third article [2].

So, without further ado, let's look at the page once it is rendered on a test server:

As mentioned earlier the page is localized, currently you can only switch between French and English (using your browser language settings), but as you can see here the French version:

The page contains the following labels and corresponding data points (indented)

• Asset type
  • assetype
• Asset tag
  • assettag
• Manufacturer
  • manufacturer
• Model
  • model
• Serial Number
  • serialnumber
• Owner
  • username
• $assettype remittance form
• Delivery date
  • timestamp
• Signature
• Loremipsum
• Loremipsum2

Installing the files

Unzip the attached files and copy or move them to your SMP Altiris installation folder under the path "AssetControl\Web\Printing\" and that's it. To make sure the page works you can navigate to your SMP console at http://localhost/altiris/assetcontrol/printing/assetprintview.aspx. Once the page compiles successfully you will see the form in French or the default language with no data points. That's it. Next we'll add a custom right click action for easy use of the feature in the SMP console.

Creating the right click action

In order to create the right click action you need to navigate on the Console to "Settings > Notification Server > Right click menu > User Defined". Right click on the folder in the tree, and select "New > Right Click Action".

On the new page, populate the form with the following values (customisable values are in italic, mandatory values are in bold)

• Name: Asset printview
• Resource type: Asset
• Action type: url
• Base url: /altiris/assetcontrol/printing/assetprintview.aspx?itemguid=%Resource GUID%
• Substitution parameters:
  • Parameter name:Resource GUID
  • Parameter guid:Resource Guid

Save the right-click action and right-click the newly created item, select Move and move the entry up to the "Right click action root". You have completed the installation and configuration tasks - you can use the feature now.

Using the right click action

You can navigate to the Manage Assets View and open some of the various assets report: Computer, Cellphones or which ever Asset type you desire to view thru the AssetPrintview form. Open the report and right-click on the asset that interest you, scroll down the right-click item list and click on "Asset printview". Then the print view page will open in a new tab. Voila!

Conclusion

In this short article we have setup a custom print view right click action for all asset types. Next we will be looking at the html form and asp.net code to understand how to reuse the form to customize the look and feel of it, as well as to extend the language support - which is currently limited to English (default) and French (fr-FR).

References

[1] Coming up - Customizing the Asset printview web-page
[2] Coming up - Customizing the Asset printview code-behind and localization