The esup-helpdesk is highly configurable and customizable thanks to Spring, layout programming and systematical usage of Java interfaces.

The issue is not the customization itself but keeping the customizations when upgrading the application.

esup-helpdesk offers a very flexible mechanism to recover the customizations:

• the main configuration files of the application (/build.properties, /properties/config.properties)
• configuration files changed locally by the deployers (/properties/*)
• more generally all the files changed or added locally (sources, stylesheets, ...)

In order to ease the recovering of the customizations, edit the property custom.recover.files in /build.properties. For instance, we assume here that the deployer has:

• added a customization class to link to an external inventory application (edu.domain.helpdesk.computerUrl.InventoryComputerUrlBuilderImpl)
• edited the configuration file /properties/domain/computerUrl.xml to add a bean of this class

He(she) will have to change the property this way:

custom.recover.files= \
src/edu/domain/helpdesk/computerUrl/InventoryComputerUrlBuilderImpl.java \
properties/domain/computerUrl.xml

Calling the ant task recover-config will automatically recover those files from the folder of the previous release.