Applications

Application caption is the label that appears of the top of the window. You can use application caption to easily differentiate between the different environments. For example, you may create the application caption for your financial reporting development environment to FINANCIAL REPORTING – DEV and create a different application caption, such as Financial Reporting – Production for production usage.

Some Dodeca customers are very specific about the look and feel of the applications in their company. For example, we have a customer who has a specific color and font that they prefer to use to brand all of their internal applications. You can create a custom style library. To create a custom style library, we recommend to start with an existing library and to modify the values for the existing library. The built-in Application Style Editor can be used to help create the custom style libraries.

Note that some companies use custom styles, in addition to the custom style library, to differentiate between Development, UAT, and Production environments.

Dodeca authentication services are intended for use both for authenticate upon Dodeca startup and for authorization while inside Dodeca. Authentication services also define how roles for the user are obtained; the roles are used within Dodeca to, among other things, allow users to see views or categories of views. Roles are also available via workbook scripting in order to finely tailor data displayed in a view.

To limit access to admin functionalities within Dodeca, mark an application as an Admin application and set the AdminPrivilegeRequiredForStartup property to True. By taking these steps, the user must have the Admin role in order to gain access to the application.

The application security category contains both the Password and the PasswordPrompt properties. These properties were introduced in Dodeca long ago as a short term solution to limit access to a Dodeca admin application and have been superseded by Dodeca Authentication Services. We strongly recommend that these properties not be used to secure an application.

The SessionTimeoutPolicy defaults to None meaning that the Dodeca client session will never timeout. This property does have two other options. You can set the timeout to be InactivityBased which will shut down the Dodeca client after a specified amount of time with no user interactivity. The other timeout option is the Scheduled option which will shutdown the Dodeca client at a specified time each day. Both of these timeout options have configurable properties to allow the administrator to control, for example, whether the user has the option to reauthenticate and continue.

Application level tokens can be a useful tool to provide application level settings. However, in deployments that have numerous applications, navigating to the editor for each application object and perhaps setting the same token multiple times for different application objects may not only be tedious, but it may also be an opportunity for errors. Beginning in Dodeca 7.7.0, a developer may specify a SQLPassthroughDataset object to query a database in order to specify Application Tokens. For this query, special tokens to specify the tenant, application, deployment url, user id, and authenticated user id, are provided in order to filter the query to obtain the correct set of values for the tokens.

Many customers prefer to work with Excel templates in Excel itself, so they routinely export the Excel file from the Binary Artifacts metadata editor, modify the file in Excel, and then import the Excel file back into the Binary Artifacts metadata editor. The ViewSelectorProperties contain two properties that make this process much easier. The AllowExportExcelTemplate and AllowImportExcelTemplate properties, when set to True, allow the user to right-click on the view in the View Selector and import or export the file directly to the developer’s desktop for editing within Excel.