Getting started

Congratulations on choosing Ainua Portal as your self-service solution!

Once you have obtained the access rights for your portal instance, you can start configuring everything ready for your end-users.

1. Branding
   • Color palette
   • Logo and name
   • Header style
   • Default content style
   • Default data style
2. Pages * n
   • Visual content
   • Data presentations usage in pages
3. Data * n and Data presentations * n
   • Visual presentation
   • On click behavior
   • Used actions
4. Actions * n
   • Common actions
   • Data actions
   • Timed actions
5. Connectors
   • Data connectors
   • Action connectors
6. Translations
   • Languages
   • Common translations
   • Pages translations

All this configuration is done without a single line of custom software code via the Ainua Portal administration pages.

Branding

Branding is a one time setup that needs to be done for any new portal deployment. It defines the common styles related to colors and other appearance of the portal.

• Background color or background image respectively
• Portal logo and name
• Portal menu style

The default styles for content and data texts, buttons, etc are defined in branding section.

Pages

Pages are the heart and soul of portal build on top of Ainua Portal. Each page consists of a number of components. Components cover simple content like text and images all the way to data presentation components. Page as such is very flexible on how it is constructed and it is also possible to override the default styles in component level in pages.

• Text components
• Image components
• Video components
• List components
• Attachment components
• Data presentation components

Each component can be a read-only or editable in order to implement forms and capabilities to feed data for actions.

Pages can be defined to visible for only signed in users and also within each page it is possible to define sections that are visible to everyone, to signed in users or only to anonumous users. This capability enables Ainua Portal to be used from basic web sites to hyper-personalized solutions with personalized content in every page.

Data and data presentations

Data presentation is a layer on top of data which allows to define how data from each item entry is presented. Data presentation contains capabilities for:

• Filtering data for example against account or user profile
• Sorting data based on given data field
• Building data presentation using text, image, etc. components utilizing data and statically entered infprmation

Actions

The second important aspect of Ainua Portal is the bi-directional nature of the data coming from integrations. Actions can be simple things like jumping to a specific link on a related service or sending an email when user is requesting some action to be done, all the way to fully integrated interaction with back-office solution using webhooks style callbacks.

Each action can use one or more action connectors and also store data locally. Action can prompt additional data from user before executing an action.

Common actions

Common actions are type of actions that do not directly refer to any specific data. They can be used from a simple navigation action to creating for example a new message to be sent over an REST API to back office.

Data actions

Data actions allow to create actions bound to a specific data. Typically this would be useful for example when editing an existing data or for example when placing an order that refers to a product data.

Data actions are created first and then included to a data presentation for data. Same data action can be used in multiple data presentations giving that they obviously have the same data source they refer to.

Notice that the action from a data does not need to target to the same data.

Timed actions

Timed action is a special type of data action that can be used for example to create email reminders and similar data related automated actions. Timed action can be set to trigger on given time before a certain deadline. Therefore this type of action requires that there is some time information in the data it refers to.

Connectors

Data connectors and action connectors define the capabilities that are used in actions.

Data connectors are used for incoming data. For each data entity a separate data connector is required because Ainua Portal uses the data conectors to distinquish different data sources based on those.

Action connectors are used for sending data out from Ainua Portal. There are several types of action connectors:

• Navigation action - possible pass data as query paramater in URL
• Email action - pass data in email body
• REST action - pass data in REST URL or body

Translations

Ainua Portal supports any number of languages for the client side. It is possible to directly use only the texts that have been defined in the configurations, or if multiple languages are needed, extend to defining them and giving necessary translations. Translations are provided via Ainua Portal administration. When languages have been defined the language selection becomes available to client side automatically.

Translations allow also to pick different data source from the integration for different languages. This is useful for example for product names or what ever is different in different language in the back-office as well.