The Building Blocks

Famark Cloud Platform as a Service implementation simplifies online services development by introducing an approach of assembling basic building blocks present in the platform. These building blocks are categorized into three types –

1. Structure building blocks – entities, relations, actions, etc.
2. Security building blocks – users, permissions, profiles, etc.
3. Layout building blocks – sites, views, forms, etc.

For a systematic understanding of Famark Cloud, the information is divided into four small documents - three for each type of entities plus a programming guide.

Structure Entities

Structure entities are a group of entities that define the data model of a solution. Basically it allows configuring the different tables (columns) and their relationships with other tables.

This set of entities contain:-

1. Entity (Type) – to specify name for a database table in which different records will be stored.
2. Attribute – the different types of attributes(columns) associated with the entity.
3. Relations – to relate two different entities as one to one, one to many or many to many.
4. Actions – operations associated with the entities like creating, updating, deleting records etc.
5. Option Sets – for select drop down type attributes the different options available in them.
6. Web Folders – a hierarchical folder structure into which different files can be uploaded.
7. Emails – to send or receive emails from and to the Famark system.
8. Solutions – to group the different entities, relations, etc. such that they can be exported as a configuration package.

Functionalities related structure entities are detailed in - Famark System and Solution

Security Entities

Security entities are a group of entities that define access permissions on each of the entity configured in the solution.

This set of entities contain:-

1. Users – users who can log into the Famark system.
2. Departments – to create a hierarchical organization structure and associated users with such business units.
3. Filters – to create filter conditions corresponding to entities based on which access is granted to different user profiles.
4. Permissions – to configure access for every action against each entity, such as create, read, update, and delete actions corresponding to an entity.
5. Profiles – to associate users with profiles (roles) that contain set of permissions based on which the corresponding user can perform action.

Functionalities related to security entities are detailed in - Famark Security, Abstraction and Identity

Layout Entities

Layout entities are a group of entities that define customizations for look and feel of each entity when they are being displayed to users.

Note: corresponding to each entity configured in the system a set of views and forms are automatically created by the platform. However it is possible to configure more such views and forms or modify the ones created by default.

This set of entities contain:-

1. Site – to configure the landing page with different links that appears to the user. It is possible to configure multiple sites, each for different set of users; for example internet visitors can be presented a read only site that does not require sign in. while customers and employees can have different site for each that require sign in.
2. Navigation Groups – to configure groups of links available in the site.
3. Forms – to configure the dialog through which users can add or edit records of each entity.
4. Views – to configure the grid (table) that shows records corresponding to each entity.
5. Form Scripts – to configure JavaScripts that add behaviors to the forms.
6. View Scripts – to configure JavaScripts that add behaviors to the views.
7. Reports – to configure different types of charts based on data present in the system.

Functionalities related to layout entities are detailed in - Famark Site, Handlers and Reports

Famark Programming Guide - API, Action Service Tutorial

Famark provides web API (Application Program Interface) for applications to perform actions programmatically or retrieve information from the platform. The API is available through multiple standard endpoint addresses, for SOAP and REST supporting both XML and JSON data formats.

Applications and extensions can be developed in any of the existing programming languages. While the documentation is available for JAVA, .Net and JavaScript but the platform is accessible to other technologies that support web communication such as PHP, Objective-C, etc.

Information related to Famark action service API is detailed in - Famark Programming Guide