Here is a trick to create a keyboard shortcut to work order tracking or any application you wish from any screen in Maximo.  Here is a quick rundown of some available keyboard shortcuts for Maximo, but these aren’t really helpful in terms of navigating from one application to another.  If you want to go from Work Order Tracking to Assets, you would have to click on ‘Go To’, hover over ‘Asset’, then click on ‘Assets’… and that’s assuming that you move the mouse correctly without having the dropdown list disappearing.  I hate that!  Now with this trick, you can quickly access your favorite applications with just a quick key press.

In order to add these shortcuts to the screen we have to modify the LIBRARY.xml file.  Go to the Application Designer, click on Select Action -> Export System XML. Click on the blue arrow to the left of “LIBRARY”.  Save this XML file to your desktop or something and make a backup of it just in case something goes wrong or if you want to revert back to your original settings.

Open this file in notepad, wordpad or your favorite XML editor.  Now you want to search for the tag

id=”pageFooter”

This tag should be empty, meaning there are no child elements that belong to it.  The footer element doesn’t seem to be utilized by IBM in any significant way, so we can add some controls here that the user won’t even see or even know about, except for you of course.  Now, we are going to add some tags to it for our custom keyboard shortcuts.  Change your tag to look like this:

Save these changes and import this file back into Application Designer.

As you can see, I have added two new hyperlinks to this page footer element.  The keyboard shortcut “ALT+K” goes to the work order tracking module and the “ALT+A” goes to the asset module.  You can add as many modules as you want here and set the “accesskey” attribute to whatever you want it to be.  Just make sure that those shortcuts aren’t already taken.  You can find all the used shortcuts in this LIBRARY.xml file so just search for it to see if it’s already used.

Explanation

So how does this work exactly?  Well, all we are doing is adding a hyperlink control to the “pageFooter” element. The first property ‘accesskey’ is just a basic HTML attribute stating that this is the keyboard shortcut that we want to assign to this hyperlink.  The property ‘classname’ is just a CSS class name that is predefined in the maximo.css file.  This field isn’t required and you can change it to whatever you want.  You can also change the maximo.css file as well.  The property ‘mxevent’ is tells Maximo, when this link is clicked, run the event called ‘changeapp’ and what we has to this event is the value stored in the ‘eventvalue’ attribute.  This our case, we are passing in ‘wotrack’ and ‘asset’ respectively.  How did I get these values?  Well, these are the object names used in Maximo.  If you go into the database configuration, you can see and search for ‘WOTRACK’ and ‘ASSET’ as the object names.  And lastly, the ‘id’ property is just a unique id for the given hyperlink.  Make sure these id’s are unique or else Maximo will complain when you import them back into App Designer.

Using these shortcuts

You can use these shortcuts from anywhere within Maximo page that contains this “pageFooter” element.  From the looks of it, most of the pages uses it, so you should be all set.

More options…

This is not the only one way of doing this.  You don’t have to have these just as keyboard shortcuts and hidden from everyone.  You can actually add these to the start center links up on top next to the “Go To” and “Start Center” links are.  The possibilities are endless.  Play around with it and let us know how you make out….