How to Start a Portal

Key considerations:

• Depending on the project need, portals can be driven dynamically from Views or statically from Tables. When choosing consider:

  • Files are only available to bulk download through Views. (Bulk download feature not exposed in the web UI in Tables).

  • There is potentially a performance hit in Views (in dispute; has not been fully tested) if there are varying access permissions across the set of files and many facets.

• External content that the portal renders within the site must be hyperlinked "https". Links out can be http or https.

• Sharing settings on Tables

  • Make Public - Anyone on the web, Can View.

  • All Tables must be explicitly allowed anonymous access in order to be visible to anyone on the web (without logging in to Synapse). Follow these steps, with authorization from the portal PI or department head, to whitelist the Table.

  • A change to ACL could disrupt visibility although, whitelist status is still maintained in the back-end.

Jira

Portal development coordination is tracked in the Community Portals Jira project. Create an appropriate Epic within your own project (for the computational oncology, systems biology, or neurodegenerative research teams, this should be in the SCIENCE project) to track the overall project. It is the job of the respective portal product manager to triage issues to the engineering team appropriately.

Ljubomir Bradic (Unlicensed) is responsible for triaging and assigning design related issues, and Jay Hodgson for portal engineering components.

What are the first steps?

1. Fill out the 1-pager for product and design and submit a Jira in the PORTALS project for review.

2. Open a Jira to task the design team with the creation of relevant wire frames. Designers will implement logo and color scheme. Depending on the level of customization or needs for external parties, a complete wireframe may not be required. This is at the discretion of the design team.

3. A Synapse Project drives the backend of the portal. Make a Synapse project (e.g. PEC).

4. Open a Jira issue with PORTALS to (e.g. PEC) create required infrastructure. This creates an empty AWS bucket.

5. Implement design in the staging site by opening a Jira issue with PORTALS (e.g. PEC).

6. Create Tables and Views in Synapse to drive the Explore and Homepage components of portals. The names and number of tabs nested under Explore is customizable.
   Note - if you enable Full-Text-Search on Tables, the portal will surface this capability to the user.

   

7. Define the schemas for Tables and Views in Confluence pages. Be explicit about the Synapse entity to reference and the number of secondary fields to display in the cards. Secondary fields are defined in the UI Mapping /wiki/spaces/PEC/pages/844759171.

• Display Name - The Column Name will be the Display Name unless explicitly specified in the schema. If the Column Name is camelCase, it will automatically display as Camel Case.

• Column Name

• UI Mapping - Define the hierarchy of variables to display on the cards as title (e.g. Center for Cancer Systems Pharmacology), subTitle (e.g. Harvard University), description (e.g. The Center….), secondaryLabels[0](e.g. INVESTIGATOR), secondaryLabels[1] (e.g. GRANT NUMBER) etc.

  

• Destination - Note where a column should hyperlink to other resources within the portal.

• Searchable Y/N -

• Search hint text -

• Markdown Y/N - While simple markdown (links, bullets, bold, etc) is supported in underlying tables, explicitly specify which columns contain markdown in the schema.

Testing on Portals

1. Scenarios to test on staging when updating portals

2. For portals on a new *.synapse.org subdomain: verify that authentication state is shared between synapse.org and your portal

   1. Sign out of your Synapse account on your portal

   2. Sign in to your Synapse account on www.synapse.org

   3. Navigate to your portal (<portalname>.synapse.org). You should be automatically signed in.