Embedding external pages on a PeopleSoft page

Although rare, you may have come across a situation where you want to display an external website or a portion of external website within your PeopleSoft transaction page. For instance you have your expense report creation page and you may want to display all the recent policy changes related to expense reimbursement as a scroll or news bar within your PeopleSoft page. And your company might already have hosted the relevant information in your company portal. The traditional options you might try out is to provide a link to the company portal or duplicate the information in PeopleSoft. I will talk about an alternative to handle this scenario, which is displaying the relevant portion of your company portal site within the PeopleSoft page. This option is best suited only if your PeopleSoft transaction page has the necessary real estate to accommodate the external site.

To customize the page generated by People Tools, PeopleSoft has provided a mechanism called “HTML Areas” to include your own custom HTML codes. You can extrapolate this option and can extend this to bring up an external site within the PeopleSoft page. iFrames are one of the best options available to bring up other contents without disturbing the existing landscape or architecture.

Let us take a step by step approach on how to bring up a third party page to PeopleSoft page. For that you have two cases. First one is you know the URL upfront and the second case is the URL to be opened up is dynamic.

Case 1: Static URL

Step 1: Open the page in application designer and draw an HTML area of size that you may want to dedicate for the external site.

Step 2: Open the properties of HTML area and on the HTML tab select the value type as Constant.

Step 3: On the edit area copy paste the below code. Remember to replace the URL with the URL which you may want to bring up on the page.

<iframe src="http://www.google.com"></iframe>

Step 4: Save the page and start testing  J.

Case 2: Dynamic URL

Consider the case of bring google page itself on your PeopleSoft page. But this time you want to bring up the google result page directly based on value specified on another field on the PeopleSoft page. So the target external URL may vary from each transaction in this case. The steps are pretty much same except for minor variations.

Step 1: Open the page in application designer and draw an HTML area of size that you may want to dedicate for the external site.

Step 2: Open the properties of HTML area and on the HTML tab select the value type as Field. Provide the record name and field name of any work record field that you may want to use.

Step 3: Now open your page activate event and insert the below code. Note: The event can vary depending upon your requirement.

Rem Change the &sURL value as per the target page you want to bring up;

&sURL = “http://www.google.com/#bav=on.2,or.&fp=1&q=” |TRANSACTION_RECORD.MY_FIELD.Value ;

DERIVED.HTMLAREA.Value = "<iframe src=""” | &sURL | “””> </iframe> “;

Step 4: Save the code and start testing  J.