Coaches will not load when using SPARK controls

Dave Wakeman

June 23, 2015 at 8:51 am #270

I am trying to use the SPARK controls in a new process application with BPM 8.5.6.  I create a heritage human service and added some SPARK controls (Responsive Sensor, Vertical Layout, Table Layout, Table Layout Row, Table Layout Cell, Panel, Text, etc.).  When I try to run the service I keep getting a blank page.  In the browser console I can see that it is getting a 404 error trying to load utilities.js during the call to initialize the control.  It doesn’t seem to matter which SPARK controls I use, as soon as I add one to the coach it fails, even if I have other non-SPARK controls on the page.

Upon further investigation it would appear that the SPARK toolkit has a “soft” dependency on the Coaches toolkit that ships with BPM.  In my case, since I was replicating a coach I had created with the Responsive Coaches tech preview toolkit I had removed the Coaches toolkit so that I wouldn’t inadvertently use them.  It would seem that the SPARK toolkit assumes that the Coaches toolkit will be part of the process application.  When I added the Coaches toolkit back into my process application the SPARK controls worked just fine.

I will admit that it was a bit unorthodox to remove the Coaches toolkit, but the truth is that my coaches worked just fine with only the Responsive Coaches toolkit.  Does the SPARK toolkit really have a dependency on the Coaches toolkit?  If so, why is that the case?

 

Thanks!

– Dave Wakeman

Stephen Perez

June 23, 2015 at 10:14 am #271

The SPARK toolkit does indeed have a dependency on the default Coaches toolkit; specifically, there is a dependency on that utilities.js file in many of the controls, as that file provides several useful methods for controlling behavior and appearance in the SPARK toolkit. The existence of this dependency means that you will have to keep the stock Coaches toolkit installed.

If you don’t want the stock toolkit to show up in the list of controls while building your coaches, either because you want to make sure you don’t accidentally use them, or because it’s just more stuff to sort through, you can easily filter them out at the top of the same panel. All controls in the SPARK toolkit have tags that end with an asterisk (*), which serves to both, make them easily identifiable in the filter, as well as differentiate them from the stock Coaches toolkit tags, while still retaining the same categories.

I hope this both answers your question about the dependency, as well as helping you to work around it 🙂

Dave Wakeman

July 6, 2016 at 7:29 am #2278

Hello,

Can anybody confirm whether this is still a problem in 8.5.7 with the Responsive Coaches toolkit?  I’ve heard anecdotally from colleagues that they have been able to remove the Responsive Coaches toolkit and they haven’t had any issues, but I would rather have this confirmed rather than rely on a bit of luck.

I would prefer to completely remove the stock Responsive Coaches toolkit from my process applications if it won’t cause any issues with SPARK.

Thanks!

SPARK Support

July 6, 2016 at 10:08 am #2279

Hello David,

That is correct, the dependency on the stock Coaches toolkit (including the Responsive Coaches toolkit in BPM 8.5.7, but also including the Coaches toolkit in BPM 8.5.6 and below) in all versions of BPM was removed in SPARK 4.2.0. So as long as you’re running with the version of SPARK or higher, there should be no problems removing any stock UI toolkits.