Adding custom SmartParts in SalesLogix 7.2 Web is an easy task. However, a little extra effort can make it look polished and complete. Adding an icon to your custom SmartPart can add an additional professional look, with little effort.

Let’s say for example, that I want to add a custom SmartPart to the customer portal to alert customers of some important message. We’ll just create this as a static message in the SmartPart. We can easily create this by opening a text editor creating a new file with extension “ascx” and adding the following:

<div style="color:Red; font-style:Italic;">
    This is an important message for all customers!
</div>

We then can add this into the Support File section of the customer portal and add the SmartPart to the the MainContent workspace of the page we’d like it to be displayed on. We’d see a result like this:

Not too bad, except we have that empty space where an icon would look so nice. To add this, we’ll need to add a code-behind because we’ll need it to implement the ISmartPartInfoProvider interface. We’ll change the ascx file to look like this and name it “CustomerPortalMessage.ascx“:

<%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="CustomerPortalMessage.ascx.cs"
    Inherits="SmartParts_CustomerPortalMessage" %>

<div style="color:Red; font-style:Italic;">
    This is an important message for all customers!
</div>

We’ll then create a separate text file, named “CustomerPortalMessage.ascx.cs” and add the following code to it:

using System;
using System.Web.UI;
using Sage.Platform.Application.UI;
using Sage.Platform.WebPortal.SmartParts;

public partial class SmartParts_CustomerPortalMessage : UserControl, ISmartPartInfoProvider
{
    public ISmartPartInfo GetSmartPartInfo(Type smartPartInfoType)
    {
            ToolsSmartPartInfo tinfo = new ToolsSmartPartInfo();

            // Can also (optionlly) set the SmartPart's title and description on the
            // ToolsSmartPartInfo object since it inherits from SmartPartInfo

            tinfo.Title = "Important Customer Message";
            tinfo.Description = "";

            tinfo.ImagePath = Page.ResolveClientUrl("images/icons/Whats_New_3D_Files_32x32.gif");
            return tinfo;
        }
}

Now when we add this SmartPart to a page (remember to add both files to the Support Files of the portal), it will look like this:

Much better 😉