Branding

Introduction

With the help of RAPs branding features you're able to define several (visual) aspects of your RAP application. This includes for example the page title which is shown in the browser or the theme to be used for the application.

Capabilities of the Branding

You can define a new branding by creating an extension for the org.eclipse.rap.ui.branding extension point.

And here the same as it appears in the plugin.xml: 

  
  <extension
        point="org.eclipse.rap.ui.branding">
     <branding
           id="org.eclipse.rap.demo.branding1"
           servletName="tea"
           defaultEntrypointId="org.eclipse.rap.demo.entrypoint1"
           themeId="org.eclipse.rap.demo.alttheme"
           title="It's tea-time"
           favicon="icons/favicon2.ico"
           body="body.html"
           exitConfirmation="Do you really want to leave the party?">
     </branding>
  </extension>

servletName

The servletName attribute is responsible for the URL of the application for the outside world. For those without J2EE experience this means that you your application will be available at <host>:<port>/<servletName>.

defaultEntrypointId

The defaultEntrypointId refers to an entrypoint which should be used as the default one for this servlet. Looking at the example branding above the URI http://<host>:<port>/tea and http://<host>:<port>/tea?startup=foo are equivalent if there is an entrypoint defined with the id org.eclipse.rap.demo.entrypoint1 and parameter foo.

themeId

Which theme to be used for this branding can be specified here. You need to provide an id for the theme that is defined by an extension of org.eclipse.rap.ui.themes. Without the themeId the RAP standard theme will be used.

See also RWT Theming

title

To define the title which will be shown in the browser title or the the title of the browser tab, you can use the title attribute.

favicon

The favicon is the icon shown in the address bar of the browser. This has to be a valid .ico file to be correctly displayed in the browser.

body

If you have the need for some custom (X)HTML markup in the RAP index page you can register a valid (X)HTML file with the body attribute which will be included in the body tag of the generated index page.

exitConfirmation

If not empty the string in exitConfirmation will be shown to the user if he wants to leave the RAP application. This is useful to prevent users to accidentally close the browser window/tab.

NOTE: This will only work in browsers of the Mozilla family and Internet Explorer. Some of the supported browser don't only use the specified string but instead wrapping it in some other explaination why this popup is opened.

Element additionalHeaders

To extend different aspects of the generated index page you can add a subelement called additionalHeaders to your branding to add for example meta tags. These informations will be added to the <head> tag of the index page.

See this example: 
  
  <additionalHeaders>
    <meta
      content="RAP Team"
      name="author">
    </meta>
  </additionalHeaders>

Available tags are meta and link. Furthermore you can add as much additional attributes to each tag with the attribute element.

Element associatedEntrypoints

The idea behind this is to have several different entrypoints in your application but you want to group them behind a special branding (servletname, theme, etc). In the normal use case you will not have the associatedEntrypoints and thus every entrypoint is available in every branding. Introducing such an element will give you the chance to allow only certain entrypoints for this branding. Imagine you have the following entrypoints defined:

With branding in place you can now group them together so Customer A and Administration A have the same branding (page title, servletName, theme) and are not allowed to use the stuff of Customer B with this branding. A sample implementation of the branding for Customer A could look like this: 

  
  ...
  <associatedEntrypoints>
    <entrypoint
      id="org.eclipse.rap.demo.customerA">
    </entrypoint>
    <entrypoint
      id="org.eclipse.rap.demo.customerA_Admin">
    </entrypoint>
  </associatedEntrypoints>
  ...
And the same should be done for Customer B (with other entrypoint ids)