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Portal Setup

Portal, the workspace sold as CoderFlow for Business, gives business users a place for their assigned reports and applications. Setting it up is a one-time administrator task in two places:

  • Server Settings → Portal, for the whole server;
  • the Portal tab of each environment that should serve Portal users.

What Portal users do there is described in the Portal user guide, starting with Getting Around Portal.

Turn on Portal and brand it​

Open Server Settings → Portal → Portal Access and Branding. Viewing it needs settings:view; saving needs settings:manage.

  • Enable Portal (off by default) lets assigned users open Portal.
    • Each environment must also enable it (below).
    • Turning Portal off keeps saved reports.
    • While it is off, Portal is not served and environments don't show their Portal tab.
    • If the server sets CODERFLOW_PORTAL_ENABLED=true or false, that value overrides the switch, and the card says so.
  • Company logo: Upload a PNG, JPEG or WebP of up to 64 KB, shown in the Portal header. Use Use CoderFlow logo to go back to the default.
  • Portal name: up to 40 characters, shown next to the logo and in the browser tab. Leave it empty for the built-in name, CoderFlow for Business.

The card previews the header as you change it. Click Save; Open Portal opens the workspace once Portal is on.

The same page has Application hosting, the separate browser address Portal uses for applications. See IBM i Portal Applications.

Choose what an environment offers​

Open the environment's Portal tab. Editing needs environments:manage; others see the settings read-only.

Portal Access:

  • Enable Portal for this environment lets Portal users open the environment, launch its applications and run saved reports with their own logins.
  • Allow report sharing (off by default) lets users share reports with everyone who has report access.
  • Allow scheduled questions (off by default) lets users with report access and the automations:use permission schedule a Portal question, at most daily. Creating or changing a scheduled question needs the Full edition. In Essentials, users can only turn existing scheduled questions on or off and run them.
  • Allow hourly schedules appears once scheduled questions are on. Hourly runs can cost up to 24 times more.
  • Task environments for IT requests chooses where work requested from Portal is developed. See Task environments for IT requests.

Application catalog:

  • The applications Portal users can launch.
  • Genie skin (empty for Instance default) applies to new launches of every IBM i application in the catalog. See IBM i Portal Applications.

Report Creation:

  • Enable report creation (on by default) lets users create private reports. It does not turn on Portal for the server.
  • Saved data scripts can use the internet (on by default).

Agent and Model: choose Customize to pick the agent, model, effort and context window used to write reports, instead of the defaults.

Data Access: which IBM i libraries and tables Portal users can query, and the library lists for unqualified table names. See Portal Data Access.

Give people access​

Users need Portal permissions through their roles:

  • portal:access: open Portal in the assigned environment.
  • portal:apps: open applications from the environment's Portal application catalog. Without it, people can use Portal but cannot launch its applications.
  • portal:data: use the environment's data: reports and report folders, Portal Ask conversations and scheduled questions, and their read-only queries. Without it, those parts of Portal answer Environment data access denied.

IBM i data and applications also use each person's own IBM i login, saved under Profile Settings → IBM i Connections. Portal never grants more IBM i authority than that login has. See Permissions and People & Access.

Ask CoderFlow​

Portal setup is done rarely, so Ask CoderFlow explains these settings from this page and does not change them. It can read your Portal workspaces, reports and schedules, and link you to places in Portal.