Hyrax - Customizing Hyrax

There are several ways in which Hyrax can be customized:

• Web interface look and feel can be changed, as can the pages served.
• Custom DispatchHandlers for the OLFS
• Custom RequestHandlers for the BES.

Web page customization

Hyrax's public "face" is the web pages that are produced by servlets running in the Tomcat servlet engine. Almost all of these pages can be completely customized by the site administrator by editing a combination HTML, XSLT, and CSS files.

Where to make the changes

All of the default versions of the HTML, XSLT, and CSS files come bundled with hyrax in the $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/opendap/docs directory. You can make changes there, but installing new versions of the OLFS software will overwrite your modifications.

However, if the docs directory is copied (preserving it's structure) to $CATALINA_HOME/content/opendap/ (creating the directory $CATALINA_HOME/content/opendap/docs), then Hyrax will serve the files from the new location.

Warning

Do NOT remove files from this new directory (Or the old one for that matter). Each file, in it's location, are required by Hyrax. You can make changes to the files but you should not rename or remove them.

Nothing inside the $CATALINA_HOME/content directory is (automatically) changed when installing new version of Hyrax.

Servlets

There are 3 servlets that produce the web pages for Hyrax.

hyrax servlet

The hyrax servlet produces all of the dynamically generated content. This includes all DAP responses, errors, THREDDS catalogs, and OPeNDAP directories. It uses XSLT to generate the OPeNDAP directory views and error pages. The XSL transforms are stored as files in the distribution and can be replaced to changed the way that these are formatted, and even what links and information that they contain.

docs servlet

The docs servlet serves files found in the

view servlet

The view servlet is a component of the THREDDS software that serves the NetCDF-Java tools via webstart.

The pages that are Docs Servlet