Rightnow Customer Portal development - An customers point of view

Rightnow Customer Portal development

Disclaimer: All the information here is mostly self-taught or self-learned – I do not have any direct contact with the RightNow development team and anything I say here is completely based on  my understanding and could be completely wrong. Please refer to your Rightnow documentation /community for official support.

If you are a customer using the RightNow customer portal – you obviously at some point of time had the question – how do I setup something new – be it a new page, a new functionality on the site etc.

It may seem a bit daunting at the beginning - but if you have some good PHP programmer in your payroll, it is not as difficult as it seems. You don’t have to go to Professional services every time you need some new feature – and trust me on this – you really don’t! I will elaborate on when it is wiser to go to professional services vs DIY later in the post.

Ok first things first –

Everything I am going to describe here applies to the “Customer Portal” version – so if you are using classic pages from RightNow – most of this does not apply to you and I have no suggestions for you since I have not worked on the Classic pages interface.

Components of the system

With the Rightnow Customer portal – everything works on the familiar MVC principle. There are a few terms you have to be familiar with here –

·         Page
Every time you load an URL, you are calling a page – eg: /app/home or /app/answers/detail etc.

·         Template
Templates are used by pages – this way you can define a single template containing your headers, footers, CSS Styles etc and use it across multiple pages.

·         Widgets
Widgets are functional elements in a page which provide user interaction or display specific content on the page. A page may contain one or more widgets. And widgets comprise of the following:

o   Model

o   View

o   Controller

Here is my take at how the architecture works –

When you call a page on the Rightnow Customer Portal – Eg: /app/home – you are calling a page called home.php

Now Pages use templates – which helps you to share the same CSS Styles, Headers, Footers etc across multiple pages. If you open the page, you will see what template it is using by looking at the template attribute:

Eg:

< rn:meta template="customtemplate.php" clickstream="answer_list" use_profile_defaults="true" login_required="true"/ >

In the above example, you see that the page is using a template called “customtemplate.php”

Normally you will find the pages & template in the following folders:

views/pages – for pages

views/templates – for templates used by the pages.

Depending on the functionality of a page, it may contain one or more Widgets.

An example of a widget would be: My Incidents – where the widget displays incidents logged by a specific user.

Rightnow comes with several standard widgets. However, it might be necessary to additional widgets based on your requirement.

Custom widgets (those developed by your organization) are found in: widgets\custom folder.

At this time, I would encourage to take a look at your existing website and see how things are setup.

To do so – login in to your development interface using Web DAV and go to the /dav/euf/development folder.

Inside the /dav/euf/development folder you will find the following folders:

views/pages (contains all your pages eg: /app/home will be views/pages/home.php)

views/templates (contains all templates used by your pages)

widgets/custom (contains all widgets that are reference by your pages)

Models

At this point – I would like to interject and talk about “Models”

If you are familiar with the MVC paradigm, you would probably find it easier to understand what models in Rightnow do – Models in Rightnow platform interact with objects (such as answers, incidents etc) to get information about a specific instance or create a new instance or update an existing instance.

An example:

Imagine you want to create a new answer – this logic would be defined inside a model and the model will be used by your widget which will be the frontend to the end user for gathering the necessary information to create the answer.

I am not going to get into the details of how to create a new model or new view or new page etc. Please refer to the customer portal architecture document from Rightnow:  http://www.rightnow.com/pdf/Customer%20_ortal_Architecture-An_Introduction_to_the_Customer_Portal_Framework.pdf

Widgets

Let us talk about Widgets for a moment – The widgets provide the functionality to every page and is the front end for users to interact with the Rightnow system.

The widgets themselves contain the following components:

·        Controllers – controller.php
Controller is responsible for interacting with data models within rightnow system and gather all the necessary data and pass them on to a view.

·         View – view.php
Views get the data passed by its controller and presents them in a display format defined in the view.

·         Functionality Logic – logic.js
Widgets may provide interactive functionality – such as submitting a form, creating a new answer, updating an incident etc. These activities are handled via AJAX requests and they are defined in the logic.js

Deep dive into Models

Now, let us talk about models and how they interact with the system to manipulate various objects such as answers, incidents etc.

Before the introduction of the Connect API, the models often interacted with the objects using SQL queries. The Connect API defines object classes which you can use to interface with various components of the system.

Eg: The Answer object allows you to manipulate a Rightnow answer etc.

Connect API comes in different forms as you will see here: http://www.rightnow.com/cx-suite-connect.php

I have used the Connect PHP and Connect SOAP in my personal integration work and I would only focus on those in this article.

The Connect PHP API can be used within the Rightnow models to perform actions on various components. This allows you to manipulate components using standard objects instead of writing custom queries – without the fear of the query breaking in the next upgrade cycle.

The Connect SOAP API is useful if you want to expose objects within your RightNow instance to external 3^rd party applications.

You will find the full API documentation of the same here:

Connect PHP: http://community.rightnow.com/developer/fileexchange/Connect_PHP_November_2010/Default.htm

Connect SOAP: http://community.rightnow.com/developer/fileexchange/Connect_Web_Services_for_SOAP_August_2011/Default.htm

A Sample Application

Without getting too much into the specifics, I would like to explain how I would create a new functionality on the Customer portal.

Requirement:

Display the list of Answers that are assigned to me (assuming this page will be only accessible by logged in users who are setup as RightNow Named contacts)

So – in this scenario – the first thing I will do is to define a model or a method inside an existing model which will load the Answers Object (using connect php) and query for answers matching my critieria – assigned to = user logged in to the session.  At this time, the user can be a parameter which will be passed by the widget.

Then I will define a widget, which will use the model and the method to obtain the list of answers by calling the Model and method you have defined. You could pass the logged in user to the Model from the widget. This is typically done in the Widget’s controller. The Widget’s controller would then pass this data along to the view.

The view would get the resulting list of answers and present it in a suitable format such as an HTML unordered list.

Now, you can embed this widget on any page and in-turn the page could use a template to define how the whole page looks.

So that would be the sample run down of the application.

How do I create an AJAX interface?

Before we get to how do we create it, let us talk about why we need it. Imagine you need to create a new widget which would gather information from an end-user and log it as an incident within RightNow.

Now your widget would provide the user interface through the view.php. When the user performs an action such as submit the incident, now you need to save it.

If you are a traditional PHP or any web programmer, your web page would submit to another webpage which will take care of handling the saving part.

But in Rightnow, a page may contain more than one widgets. So you are not going to submit and reload the whole page because one of your widgets needs to perform some action. Instead – your widget will make an AJAX call (defined in logic.js) to interact with the backend system and make the necessary updates. Once the AJAX call is complete, your widget could refresh and display the result of the action.

Ok – now that said, how do I define AJAX call points which I can use on Widgets?

To do so, you will define a new Controller to handle AJAX functions. Controllers are defined in the controllers directory and each controller extends the standard Rightnow Class “Controller” Each function defined in the controller can be exposed as external methods that can be used by widgets.

Summary

Rightnow customer portal is a flexible system – with the help of some PHP developers, you can customize your portal by adding or modifying functionality of the site.

When to use professional services?

Well, this is only my recommendation and purely based on resources constraints we have in my team. Generally I feel that anything that has to be done with objects that have already been setup or that can be easily setup using your Rightnow Administration console – you can do it yourself.

However, if you are looking to setup a functionality with an object which is complex and difficult to setup using the Rightnow administration console, go for professional services.