CAS Themes and Views

Recently we faced a big problem in our organisation regarding the look and structure of the login pages which could not be solved by CAS standard theme concept. By default the theme definition of CAS just changes the default CSS which for sure offers a wide variety within the pages, but made it difficult for us to fit our needs.

--> We had to change it in a way that also the views change

1) In the cas properties instead of telling the real name of the views I want to see just direct in any case to some defualt view like this cas.viewResolver.basename=views-default

2) Under src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/classes add one property file for each theme you want to use afterwards

src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/classes
|
+- cas-theme-theme1.properties
|
+- cas-theme-theme2.properties
|
+- ...

3) In this files just add one more property (beside the ones that are already there by default)

theme.view=/WEB-INF/view/jsp/theme1/ui/

When the structure of your views is still like the one from default it should point perfektly to the views of theme1 in this example


4) Now change the default views e.g. src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/view/jsp/default/ui/casLoginView.jsp to the following

<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="spring" uri="http://www.springframework.org/tags" %>
<spring:theme code="theme.view" var="theme"></spring:theme>
<jsp:include page="${theme}casLoginView.jsp"/>

With this definition now the casLoginView.uses the view defined by the theme.view property in cas-theme-themeX.properties. file.


And now how to change the property file? Just use the Services GUI (e.g. https://login.cas.net/cas/services/manage.html) and enter there the name of the theme for the various services. And that's actually the power of the solution. Now you can define one default theme for your server and a lot of "real" themes for the various services that use you're CAS.


Of course it is a change in the basic logic of CAS, however it is reversable in a few steps if one day changing the basic CSS would be enough


UPDATE:
By default the theme names are cas-theme-xxx which is at least 10 chars long. The default implementation of  the CAS Serive Managemant GUI allows theme names with a maximum length of 10, so change the add.jsp to allow the longer names