Setting Up to Customize LiveCycle Contentspace (deprecated)

You must set up your development environment before you customize the LiveCycle Contentspace (Deprecated) user interface. Your development environment consists of a number of files, such as XML files, images files, and properties files, which you modify to customize the Contentspace user interface. These files are retrieved from taking the Content Services (Deprecated) WAR file (located within Content Services EAR file) and extracting it, and then organizing your development environment to modify and repackage the files back into an EAR file that you deploy to the forms server.

Note: Adobe is migrating Content Services ES customers to the Content Repository built on the modern, modular CRX architecture, acquired during the Adobe acquisition of Day Software. The Content Repository is provided with LiveCycle Foundation and is available as of the LiveCycle ES4 release.

The following illustration shows the extracted content that you should see after completing the steps in this section. This top-level view is the root level in your development environment and is referred to as root level for many of the procedures you see.

The root level showing all folders and files extracted from the contentservices.war file: css, images, jsp, META-INF, scripts, services, WEB-INF, and wsdl folders.

Summary of steps

Complete these steps to set up your development environment for customizing the Contentspace user interface.

  1. Copy the Content Services (deprecated) EAR file. (See Copying the Content Services (deprecated) EAR file .)

  2. Create a development environment for customizing Contentspace. (See Creating a development environment .)

Copying the Content Services (deprecated) EAR file

You must copy the adobe-contentservices.ear file to another location on your computer. The contents inside the adobe-contentservices.ear file are used for customizations. After you are done your customizations, you repackaged the files back into the adobe-contentservices.ear file when you are ready to deploy your customizations to the application server. Before you can complete this procedure, verify that you can access the deploy folder on the forms server.

It is recommended that you make a backup copy of the original Content Services (deprecated) EAR file in a separate location that is not part of your development environment.

Copying the Content Services (deprecated) EAR file:

  1. Create a new folder on your computer to copy the adobe-contentservices.ear file to, such as CustBuildEAR .

  2. Copy the adobe-contentservices.ear file from the LiveCycle deploy folder to the folder you created in the previous step. The deploy folder is typically located at [install folder] /deploy where [install folder] is the location where you installed LiveCycle.

Creating a development environment

Your development environment is a folder structure of files extracted from the contentservices.war file, which is extracted from the adobe-contentservices.ear file. After completing this procedure, you will have a development environment that consists of a folder to re-create the adobe-contentservices.ear file and a working folder for making customizations to. You can choose to edit your files using a simple text editor or you can import the folder structure to an integrated development environment.

The following procedure is a recommended way to set up your development for customizing the Contentspace so that you have the proper folder structure for re-creating the EAR file. The procedures suggest using a simple text editor but you can choose to use a different environment as long as you preserve the folder structure necessary for re-creating the adobe-contentservices.ear file.

To create a development environment

  1. In the folder you copied the adobe-contentservices.ear file to, perform the following steps:

    • Extract the adobe-contentservices.ear file by using an archiving utility. For example, in the command prompt, navigate to the CustBuildEAR folder and type the following command:

                  jar -xvf adobe-contentservices.ear. 

      After you enter the jar command, you will see a META-INF folder and a contentservices.war file.

    • Delete the adobe-contentservices.ear file from the folder.

  2. Create another folder, such as CustWorking and copy the contentservices.war file to the new folder you created from the folder in the previous step.This folder is used for extracting the contents of the contentservices.war file and is your root level folder for accessing the files and folder to customize Contentspace.

    Note: The folder you create must be a separate folder that is not located under the folder where the adobe-contentservices.ear file was extracted to in the previous step.
  3. Go to the folder you created in the previous step that contains the contentservices.war file and perform the following steps:

    • Extract the contents of the contentservices.war file using an archiving utility.

      For example, in the command prompt, go to the folder and type the following command:

                  jar -xvf contentservices.war 

      After you enter the jar command, a number of folders appear, such as scripts, jsp, services, WEB-INF, META-INF, wsdl, and css. This is Contentspace, which is a collection of image, JavaScript, JSP, WSDL, CSS, and XML files that you modify.

    • Delete the contentservices.war file you copied to the folder. You no longer require it because you will re-create a new contentservices.war file.

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