[ANSWERED] Navigation Trees vs Categories

[JPinTO]

In my Valence portal, I was using the 3.2 Navigation Trees to prevent users from clicking on apps that they are authorized to, but cannot be selected from a menu. These apps must be instantiated/spawned from an another app.

Question 1: How do I go about hiding Apps from being displayed so that a user cannot click on it? The user needs to be authorized to the app so that it can be shown from another app.

Question 2: How do I get different Category sequencing based on a user? I have multiple types of users (Employee vs Customers) that have different navigation tree sorting requirements.

- JP

[Scott]

For Question 1 - I put Apps like this that I want hidden in a separate category. Then uncheck the box that says the category is Enabled (click the Settings gear to get to). The category shows grayed out when you are editing the categories but when launching apps the category never shows.

Scott

[richard.milone]

For Question 2 there's a couple of options. The theory of operation between older versions of Valence and the new Valence 4.0 are completely different. Instead of an administrator (you) managing the users app sequence, in Valence 4.0 we allow the user to perform their own sequencing in the My Apps area. The idea is that user will move frequently-used apps from the main categories area into the My Apps area and sequence them however they want. If you want a different default sequence outside of the My Apps area you could set up a different Valence instance for Employees versus Customers and manage them separately in Portal Admin, although the actual apps would be exactly the same over the same database. It is very common for companies to run many instances of Valence on the same system for various purposes, but I doubt that is needed. I'd say to just sequence them by default in the most logical manner and let the end user do what they want with sequencing.

[JPinTO]

If I have multiple Valence instances, then each app that is added needs to be added in each Instance, correct?

If I have a DEV server and Production server, each with 2 instances, each app change needs to be added/changed 4x, twice in my DEV and twice in PROD.

Can Valence instances share the same app table?

In fact, I would like all the tables shared (Apps, Users, Groups, Environments) shared between the instances to avoid replication between the libraries.

[sean.lanktree]

Valence instances do not share "Valence" tables out of the box. If you wanted to accomplish this, I would suggest setting up a trigger program for each file. However, I always like to have the separation of DEV and PROD...after all why have a DEV if it is an exact replica of PROD.

Would you only want multiple instances to have a different sequencing of apps? If so, is it not more beneficial to allow your users to sequence the apps as they like on their own?

[JPinTO]

Valence instances do not share "Valence" tables out of the box. If you wanted to accomplish this, I would suggest setting up a trigger program for each file. However, I always like to have the separation of DEV and PROD...after all why have a DEV if it is an exact replica of PROD.

Would you only want multiple instances to have a different sequencing of apps? If so, is it not more beneficial to allow your users to sequence the apps as they like on their own?

We heavily rely on the Navigation menu paradigm on user setup. This is not from an app sequencing perspective.

We maintain multiple user groups, some of which may have authority to certain apps, but the app have no relevance to some user groups. We used the simpler navigation menu to remove menu items that had no relevance... rather than assign different authorities. I don't see much alternative but to change our paradigm to more complicated group authorities. The thought of converting the 1000 users profiles we currently have makes me shudder.

The loss of the navigation menus is unfortunate from our standpoint. The "old school" menus were a very clean interface.

You are correct, that having multiple separate instances is not an ideal way to do things.

- JP

[richard.milone]

I think setting up the group authorities is the way to go. If you need some assistance from CNX just contact us directly at support@cnxcorp.com or give us a call. If you did a spreadsheet or something else easier with your authorization info we could help you upload and populate the database with your initial setup. Alternative you could stick with Valence 3.2 and maybe we can see if we can build in another solution for you with an update to Valence 4.0 in the near future.