NAB - Document Viewer Widget

[opendave]

Happy New Year!!

Any chance we can get a file viewer widget? Nitro IFS Explorer already does a good job with JSON/XML/Source/PDF/Images, so maybe encapsulate that app's viewport for us to use? Ideally, I would like to automatically trigger the beautify too. And we would need to be able to control the read-only -- or make it read-only for the first iteration of the widget?

Future state, it would be really nice if it were a full html5 viewer that could handle office documents too.

And for bonus points, if we had an exit program for the Beautify function, that would be really really cool. I am envisioning a formatted for X12 EDI documents. In the meantime, I could just write them pre-beautified to the IFS if we can't do it on-the-fly...

This is a widget I could put to use immediately, so if you do decide to make one I would happily test it for you.

Thanks!
David

[Johnny Major]

Hi Dave,

Right now you can use the URL widget to view images & PDF's and we have a developer diaries that covers that.

As for the viewing JSON/XML/Text etc what is the use case so we can better understand the feature request?

Thanks

[opendave]

Hey Johnny -- I will check out the developer diaries entry -- I do not think I have seen that one.

As for use-cases, I have a few for you:
1 - we exchange a lot of JSON and XML documents with our Customers & Partners. These get archived to IFS or QNTC locations, and when someone wants to review one they typically ask the Help Desk or a developer to retrieve it. Having a self-service way to not just locate the document, but view a pretty copy of it would really be helpful.

2 - in a similar fashion, we could do the same sort of self-service portal for EDI/X12 documents. This would make users more self-sufficient and reduce the reliance on the Help Desk. We have an app rolling out this week that allows end-users to track the status of certain EDI documents and trigger a resend via a NAB app. If we had a document viewer I would add a button to the row to slide out a panel with the actual document for review.

3 - we are trying to reduce our dependence on emails for every report, and towards that end, we want to start dropping the PDF/XLS files in a library where users can access them via Valence. Being able to view/preview docs without downloading would be the goal here.

#1 is actually on my current "high priority" list for two of our Customers, so we have to build something to satisfy the need. If we can leverage the document viewer (and beautifier) already in Valence, then we get to skip the hard part ;)

Thanks!

[Johnny Major]

Hi Dave,

The Valence 6 build (6.0.20210125.1) released today has an updated Nitro IFS Explorer to accommodate some of your requests.

Nitro IFS Explorer now looks for three new parameters:

• path - path to the file on the IFS
• title - override the title on the topbar
• autoBeautify - if passed true it will automatically beautify the source it loads

To use this in your NAB application you just need to bring in a URL Widget and link the URL to Nitro IFS Explorer.

Below is an example URL that will set the title to "Print Screen Source", load "/valence-6/resources/printScreen.html" and then beautify it. When passing in a path to Nitro IFS Explorer right now it's strictly read only.

Example URL : /build/production/SourceEditor/index.html?app=86&autoLogout=false&title=Print Screen Source&autoBeautify=true&path=/valence-6/resources/printScreen.html

I would suggest copying the Nitro IFS Explorer app record within Portal Admin to a new app record. Then grant access to this new app record to the users that will be running your NAB application. Move the new app record into a hidden category so they can only launch it from within your NAB application and it will not be shown on the users launch pad.

Of course if you do this you need to change the "app" parameter passed from 86 to whatever the new app id is.

Hopefully this is what you're looking for and please let us know how this works for you.

Thanks


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