Exposing Applications

Dashboards serve as a primary medium for users to interact with applications within Iotellect. They provide a completely customizable interface that can be tailored to display various operational views, data visualizations, control elements, and more, all while strictly adhering to user roles and permissions.

Simple Mode streamlines the user experience for authenticated users by guiding them towards a specific resource. This means that upon user login, they are directed to a specified dashboard instead of the default administration dashboard.

To configure a certain dashboard users.exampleUser.dashboards.exampleDashboard to automatically run when the user with context path users.exampleUser logs into Iotellect, the following steps are taken:

• Open the context menu for the Auto Run context for the target user, and select Add Action to Auto Run. Note that the Auto Run context being opened is the Auto Run of the users.exampleUser, with context path users.exampleUser.autorun, and not the root context Auto Run with the context path autorun.

• From the Select Source window, select the dashboard that should load when users.exampleUse logs into their Iotellect account.

• Open the context menu for the user users.exampleUser, and select Edit User Properties.

• In the User Interface properties group, enable Simple Mode.

Now when the user users.exampleUser logs into Iotellect, they will be taken directly to the dashboard users.exampleUser.dashboards.exampleDashboard.

The Application Home Dashboard property of an Application allows for a default dashboard to be specified for the application. To configure the home dashboard for an application:

• Choose the Configure option from context menu of the target application to open its properties menu.

• Show the advanced settings () of the properties menu, and select the desired dashboard for the property Application Home Dashboard.

• When the Open action is called on the application, the chosen dashboard will be opened for the user.

• The Auto Run functionality described in the Simple Mode example can be applied to an application as well. Rather than adding the Open Dashboard to the Auto Run context of the Simple Mode user, instead add an Open Application action for the desired application. This will simultaneously open the application and direct the user to the specified dashboard.

• By default, the Open action opens dashboards and applications in Simple Mode for all users. To customize this behavior per user, set the Disable Simple Mode property to True. Doing so allows users with higher permissions to retain access to the administrative toolbar and interface when the application is opened.

Anonymous Permissions provide a way to expose specific resources to users without requiring authentication. For example, making the landing page of a public website accessible to anyone with network access to the server. With Anonymous Permissions enabled, unauthenticated users navigating to the root page of the server can access a specified Default Dashboard and other server resources specified by the anonymous permissions table.

In order to give anonymous (that is, unauthenticated ) users access to a dashboard with context path users.admin.dashboards.landingDashboard, the following steps can be taken:

• From the Global Server Configuration Options, navigate to the Security properties group, and then Anonymous Permissions subgroup. Enable the property Anonymous Permissions.

• Open the Anonymous Permissions Table and assign all the resources to be made accessible without authentication, which is the dashboard users.admin.dashboards.landingDashboard in this case. This table is similar to the User Permissions Table, and the row to add appears as follows:

users.admin.dashboards.landingDashboard

• Set the Anonymous Permissions Default Dashboard to users.admin.dashboards.landingDashboard, which will automatically direct anonymous users to the target dashboard when they navigate to the server root.

• Restart the Iotellect server to apply the changes made to Anonymous Permissions.

• Now anonymous users can access the dashboard users.admin.dashboards.landingDashboard by navigating to the URL serving the home page of Iotellect Server's embedded web server. Anonymous users can also access the dashboard by navigating to one of its specific URLs, as explained in URLs and Routing.

• In this example, the direct URLs for the dashboard are <URL of server root>/web/dashboards/users.admin.dashboards.landingDashboard or <URL of server root>/users.admin.dashboards.landingDashboard.

URL aliases allow alternative, often simpler or more meaningful URL paths, to be assigned to dashboards. From the example above, if the server root can be accessed by www.example.com, then the default dashboard path for the dashboard described above would be www.example.com/web/dashboards/users.admin.dashboards.landingDashboard. Although not overly complex, the URL can be simplified to www.example.com/landingDashboard using the following alias encoding and decoding expressions.

Alias configuration depends on setting two expressions, one to convert any dashboard context path into an alias, and another to convert any alias into a context path.

The Alias Encode Expression is the expression that converts dashboard context paths into the desired URLs. The below example implements a “rule” which could be described in plain language as “the alias should only be the dashboard name. The alias will be only the final path of the full context path.” This can be implemented in the expression language with the following:

substring(
	{contextpath}
	, lastIndex(
		{contextpath}
		, "."
		) + 1
)

This function uses the string processing functions substring() and lastIndex() in order to extract the dashboard name from the context path.

Suppose the full context path of the dashboard is users.admin.dashboards.landingDashboard. In this case, the reference {contextpath} will resolve to users.admin.dashboards.landingDashboard, and the function lastIndex() is evaluated with the following arguments:

lastIndex("users.admin.dashboards.landingDashboard", ".")

This expression evaluates to 22, indicating the last (starting from the left) index in the string users.admin.dashboards.landingDashboard where the dot (.) occurs.

The substring() function is then evaluated with the following arguments:

substring("users.admin.dashboards.landingDashboard", 22+1)

This evaluates to the string "landingDashboard", which is the final part of the full context path, representing the dashboard name. When the dashboard is opened from within Iotellect, for example opened by an Auto Run configuration, the displayed URL will be www.example.com/landingDashboard. The next step is to ensure that the alias can be decoded, in the case that a user navigates to the URL www.example.com/landingDashboard directly from their browser.

The Alias Decode Expression is the expression that transforms aliases back into their full context paths. Based on how the encode expression was formulated above, the decode expression should accept a dashboard name and return the full context path for the dashboard.

The following naively-implemented expression is sufficient for the decode expression:

startsWith({alias}, "users.admin.dashboards.") ?  {alias} : "users.admin.dashboards." + {alias}

When the user navigates to the URL www.example.com/landingDashboard, the environmental reference {alias} resolves to the string "landingDashboard", which is concatenated with "users.admin.dashboards." to result in the full context path users.admin.dashboards.landingDashboard of the desired dashboard. In the case that the user navigated to the dashboard using the full context path www.example.com/sers.admin.dashboards.landingDashboard, the value of alias is unchanged.

The above example is a demonstration only, and makes a number of assumptions, namely that all dashboards will be owned by the admin user, and thus have the context path users.admin.dashboards.<dashboard name>. A more robust method of implementing URL aliases would be to implement a model with a Data Table type variable that has two columns, Alias and Context Path. The encode and decode expressions can then use the variable as a mapping between aliases and context paths. This allows for arbitrary aliases without the need to write complex expressions.

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