Configuring Workspaces

This section describes the workspaces feature and how to configure it.

About this task

The workspaces feature lets your users take multiple entities from the application and group them together in a unified display page. This can be useful for monitoring a short term project, performing market research, or simply having a unified place to store and view items that would otherwise be unassociated.

Workspaces can also be used to group entity instances together for export. The export feature is described in Exporting Results and Entities.

Two types of workspace are available to the user when the workspaces feature is enabled:

Public Spaces
Public spaces can be viewed, modified, exported, and deleted by any user of the application. When an entity instance is added to a public space, it is also tagged with the name of that space so that the entity instance will appear in a search for the space. Tagging a search result also adds the result into a public space of the same name.
Private Spaces
Private spaces can only be viewed, modified, exported, and deleted by the creator of the private space. Application administrators cannot see the contents of a private space. Private spaces are identified in the user interface by the lock icon.
Note: Once set, the space type cannot be modified.

To enable the workspaces feature, perform the following steps:

Procedure

  1. When the first backend is created, a collection for storing information for workspaces is added to that backend. and the space entity is associated with that collection. This is because the workspaces feature requires a set configuration. Modification to the space entity type is not necessary.
  2. Enable the workspaces feature by setting the Enable workspaces option to on in the Application tab of the Application Builder global settings page (the cog icon on the navigation bar) and click Save application options.
  3. Configure the space display page to show the content that you want. By default, a workspace page contains an activity feed widget, an entity information widget that describes the workspace, and a shared content widget.
    Note: If the shared content widget is not included in the workspaces display, users will not be able to remove entity instances that are added to a workspace. If you want only certain users to be able to delete contents from a workspace, add appropriate display conditions to the shared content widget as described in the General Configuration Options section.