What are Elements and what can you do with them?
Elements are specifically created by your developers for use in your Catalyst system. They are essentially custom components which can be embedded into the application to enhance the user experience by providing additional information, access to third party applications, or other controls such as displaying data relating to the logged in user.
Once coded and made available via your Git repository, Elements can be used in the following places:
How Elements are hosted
Elements are hosted and secured using an IFRAME as a container within the context of one of the above forms. Isolated from the main application, they will have no direct means of communication to the page they are hosted on, or access to parameters in this context, with the exception of a limited number of values that will be automatically exposed and made available via a pub/sub mechanism, in other words, an event listener, that will include both logged-in-user auth tokens and record ID.
Why use Elements
This means that you can extend the functionality of the platform without having to request additional development from Autologyx. Quite often our customers' requests are too bespoke to justify inclusion in the main application. Elements will offer the possibility of extending the platform using custom developed HTML components, delivered through the formbuilder, and hosted within the same environment as your domain.
Access and list page
Elements can be found in the Administration section of the main navigation menu. Only users with a Super admin account type will have access.
The list page has the following default columns:
- ID: number given by the system on creation of the Element.
- Name: defined by the user on creation of the Element. This is a mandatory field in the configuration and must be unique.
- Publisher: the name of the Element's publisher, taken from the config file.
- Enabled: a flag to show whether the Element is enabled or disabled in the configuration.
- Status: there are 3 statuses to describe the progress of the installation of the Element. These are:
- Processing: indicates that the package is either being imported or installed.
- Installed: indicates that the package has been installed and the files are now in a finalised state. They are ready to be utilised and cannot be modified or altered.
- Failed: indicates that an error occurred during the downloading process. This could be due to invalid credentials, incorrect or missing files, or failure to pass the basic validation checks.
- Actions: Edit and Delete actions are available in this first phase. However disable will follow shortly.
CLICK HERE for an article about creating Elements.
Useful info
- You can have up to 100 Elements in your Catalyst instance. This is irrespective of whether they are enabled or installed. You will need to delete unused Elements if you need more having reached this number.
- Because the Element name must be unique, it is a good idea to append a version number to the end of the name if you amend and re-import an Element.