Introducing the WEM Modeler

Let The Fun Stuff Begin!

Understanding Workspaces, Projects and Portals

WEM uses Workspaces, Projects and Portals to organize applications on several levels:

• Workspace

  • Projects

    • Portals

Workspace

In a workspace you can group several projects that have things in common, like:

• Collection of Design Templates (styling definitions for look and feel);

• Runtime Environments (public shared cloud is standard, but private clouds can be made available);

• Custom SMTP settings for mail sending;

• Specific group of WEM Users that can work together in some or all projects contained in the Workspace.

Project

A Project can be of a specific type:

1. Web (with either one shared database or separate databases for each portal);

2. App (native mobile).

On the project level you manage all kinds of settings and configurations that will be available to all contained portals. These settings will be explained in more detail in the Project Settings pages. Also, all other elements (flows, datamodel and more as explained in detail below) will be part of the Project and as such available to all portals that fall under this Project.

Portal

Finally, a Portal is the entity that can be considered the Application, the actual website or the native app that users will be using to access your created functionality and features. Portals have specific settings and configurations that define how users can access the application (hostname or app-file), how it will appear (Design Template and its custom settings), how it starts (home page), which language strategy and timezone strategy will be applied.

It is possible to create multiple portals in a project. You would do this for several reasons, for example:

• you want the same application to be available via different URLs, different look and feel, different starting points, different language or timezone strategies;

• the application is used by different organizations ('multi-tenant'), that access the application through their own URL and their have own look and feel;

These portals within a project can share the data (Runtime) or each can have their own separated storage. If the various portals in a project all need their own data and/or prevent users from the other portals to access the data, you should choose to separate the databases (each portal its own storage). On the other hand, if the users of the various portals can/must share all the data, you share the database (this is the default).

More details will be explained later on, but you will encounter these terms (Workspace / Project / Portal) often, so basic understanding of their meaning is useful.

How to build an application

Building an app with WEM Modeler is very straightforward:

1. Create a new project (or copy an existing one to have a functional starting point).

2. Complete all required settings.

3. Model your application using the WEM modeler. Specify the data your app needs to work with, the workflows that make the app work, integrate with external systems when needed and create the necessary user interactions.

4. Test your application using the Preview.

5. Publish the application to the Runtime so it is available for your targeted user-audience:

   1. Staging for acceptance testing and review

   2. Live for the final real deal.

There is a lot more that can be explained about all these steps and detailed information can be found in the following pages and sections.