As you might already know, every MashApp you create with MashZone can be addressed by its own URL. This is useful to easily send a link referring to your favorite MashApp to your colleague or your boss. Based on this you might also embed a MashApp into your own website. In even more advanced scenarios you can also establish Single Sign On as MashZone understands SAML. SSO is handy to support both: Password protected MashApps and seamless portal in integration – for instance based on My webMethods.
To support such integrated scenarios even better MashZone 2.2 enables you to add your own parameters to the URL referring to a MashApp. This is useful in situations where you need to pass a context into your MashApp: A date or timestamp to filter the data of a MashApp, the current user’s department or any other parameter.
By following this pattern a website user selects some options such as a country or department before he reveals the MashApp.
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The image shows a website that embeds a MashApp. The controls on the left hand side do not belong to MashZone. Instead their state, e.g. country, is transferred into the MashApp. Currently, Germany has been selected. To try this on your own, you may refer to this link.
Select the MashApp’s second tab to find two user input boxes which store the currently selected country and department. Their values can be modified by MashZone users or – as demonstrated – from the outside via URL.
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The ability to receive values via URL parameter has to be activated in MashZone Composer for each widget individually. The setting is a little bit hidden. It provides the name of the URL parameter, e.g. “cn4.Input”. By entering a constant value MashZone provides a hint for encoding, in case your parameter value contains spaces or other characters which need special treatment when transported via URLs. This is especially useful in case values of type number or date are set.
Based on the input values MashZone displays an image for the country and selects the members of the department using its filter values mechanism.
Using the same technic you may also specify chart values which are initially selected.
To learn about the exact URL syntax you may take a look at the sample’s footer. It shows the URL which is used to render the iFrame.
