Containers, Configurations, and Resources

In this section the major entities and their mutual relationship are explained.

A TrackingOne Container is a collection of objects related to one subject, matter, or tenant. The exact meaning only depends on the intended deployment. However, the Container allows to separate things which don't belong together or should not be "visible" to each other.

The design of the Custom UI complies with this concept. Therefore, a user interface provided by a Configuration in the Custom UI belongs to one and only one Container. Furthermore, within a Configuration, only those TrackingOne contents (workflows, reports, and so on) will be visible and may be exposed by its User Interface which belong to the User Interface's Container as well.

However, each Container may have zero, one, or more Configurations and User Interfaces.

The only place where you will see objects belonging to different Containers at the same time is the start page: In the first list box, all released User Interfaces available in the Custom UI instance are listed, and in the second listbox, all Containers are listed. But you will not see which Container a User Interface belongs to.

Each Configuration forms a User Interface (maybe it's not necessary to distinguish between them). The Configuration is what you edit in the configuration area, the User Interface is what the user is using.

A Configuration can exist in multiple versions. These versions only share the same (logical) name. Basically, two versions of the same Configuration are completely separate: If you edit one Configuration version, this will not affect any other version of it. However, you can release only one version of a Configuration (identified by its logical name, not by it's title which may vary) at the same time under the same release label or level (currently, there is only one release level called "head"). A User Interface user will "see" only a User Interface whose Configuration is released, i.e. he or she can only login into a released version.

A User Interface can use Resources, i.e. images and plug-ins.

To use a Resource, that Resource has to be made available in the container by uploading and can then be referenced in the Configuration.

Resources also belong to one and only one Container. So any plug-in or image uploaded in the configuration area of Container "X" will neither be visible nor accessible from the configuration area of Container "Y," and so behave their User Interfaces.

However, Resources may be shared by all Configurations of one Container. They are referenced by their file name (without any path or prefix). Otherwise, any resource would have to be copied when creating a new version of the same configuration. So if two Configurations of the same Container reference an image by the same name, say "button.png," you can be sure that they reference the same image. The same is true for plug-ins.

If you try to upload a different resource under the same name (either directly, or by importing a configuration which may contain resources), then it will be renamed automatically, appending a number in parenthesis (e.g. "button(1).png"). This way, you will not change the images in a configuration by accident.

Since the content is compared on name collision, you can be sure that automatic renaming only occurs when the resource actually differs. The case that the same resource appears multiple times under different names will only occur when you actually give them different names.