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 and textual content
   • Data presentations usage in pages
3. Data presentations * n
   • Layout
   • On click behavior
   • Used actions
4. Actions * n
   • Common actions
   • Data actions
   • Timed actions
5. Data * n
   • Data entity
6. Connectors
   • Data connectors
   • Action connectors
7. 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 presentations

Data presentation is a layer on top of data which allows to define how a selected data is presented. Data presentation contains capabilities:

• Filtering data
• Sorting data
• Choosing which data to show (and which component to use show it)
• Add labels, titles and similar additional components to complement data presentation

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, to sending an email when user is requesting some action to be done, to fully integrated interaction with back-office solution using webhooks style callbacks.

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

Actions are created first and then included in when defining 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.

Common actions

Common actions are 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.

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 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.

Data

Ainua Portal is implemented upon a “integration first” -principle. This means that when introducing a new page or changes to an existing page we approach it by following these steps:

1. Create a new page (as needed)
   • Using Ainua Portal administration
   • Give the page a page_id
2. Use development mode
   • Change page to development mode using Ainua Portal administration
3. Do the integration
   • Using a workflow tool or other integration method push first data item to page_id
   • -> Available data becomes visible in Ainua Portal administration
   • Configure page data content visual appearance using Ainua Portal administration
4. Return to normal mode
   • Turn page development mode off using the Ainua Portal administration
   • Page becomes available to end-users

Development mode is special state a page can be set to automatically record data coming in from an integration. This simplifies the configuration of data mapping in Ainua Portal end as the admin does not need to remember what data is brought in but instead he/she can just add data elements to be shown using data presentation.

Connectors

Data 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.