Application Center
Application Center is a Windows Explorer like application you will feel at home from the start. After all, accessing your documents in a Document Management System should be just as seamless as accessing your local documents on your PC via Explorer. Of course, Application Center gives you much more power over your documents.
Application Center main window consists of 4 main areas:
- Toolbar and Main Menu: Displaying app commands.
- Navigation View: Listing user's available apps.
- Application View: The main area reserved for your app's PageViews.
- Messages View: Bottom part that displays system messages and errors.
Toolbar and Main Menu
Eeach app and each PageView within an app can define its commands. By default, when Application Center launches, the main toolbar and menu are populated with commands from StartApp. When an app is started from Navigation View, its commands are added to the existing StartApp commands and main tollbar and menu are updated accordingly.
Hint
When you are logged to the system as a developer (Member of Developers group) and you are running debugger, toolbar will be updated every 30 seconds, to make debbuging easier. That's why you have 'double click to refresh toolbar' hint. Non-developer user cannot see that hint and toolbar is updated immediatelly.
Navigation View
Navigation View lists apps available to logger user just like Windows Explorer lists drives and folders. The difference is that in the Navigation View we have apps and not folders. Even if it looks like a folder (contains other apps) it is an app (of a 'container' type). Therefore we don't have folders, we have containers.
Warning
When configuring permissions on apps, please keep in mind that apps don't inherit their security form the container they are in, but from SYS$APP document class. Although, if you don't have granted access to a container you will not be able see apps contained within.
Hint
If you start an app from a shortcut, or you start Application Center with -app switch, Navigation View will not be shown.
Application View
The main Application Center area is reserved for app's pages. Each app can create one or more PageViews, and they will be displayed as tabs in the Application View. When you start the Application Center you will see the 'Welcome to <your system name>' page, even that is an app (System.Dashboard) and you can modify it and extend it on your own. For example, you could add some reminders listing at the bottom, or messages, or TODO list.
Hint
Aapps without a PageView are exception. For instance, if the app creates a DialogView, it won’t use this area to display your app’s user interface. Instead, it will appear in a popup window.
Example of such an app is System.PropertiesApp (invoke Context Menu→Properties on any app in the Navigation View).
Application Center Command Line Options
When starting Application Center, your can specify a parameters or two:
- host: Name or IP Address of NodeActa server.
- user: User to login to the system.
- password: User's password to login to the system.
- app: Full Name of the app to automatically start when starting Application Center.