Javascript

Closer look at the DNA of the OpenFin Platform API

Published Mar 23, 2020

Updated Feb 14, 2023

8 min read

This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may be relevant but please refer to the relevant official documentation or available resources for the latest information.

This blog takes a deep dive into the newly launched Platform API by OpenFin. After only a few days of playing around with the software, I realized just how much capacity it has and how many good features there are for developers. Ultimately, this robust set of features will significantly enhance your user’s experience.

Before I begin, let's start with a bit of background information on OpenFin!

Dictionary

API: Application Programming Interface OS: Operating System CSS: Cascading Style Sheets

What is OpenFin?

Openfin is a tech company focused on modernizing desktops, and accelerating innovation in the financial sector. Simply put, OpenFin is the Operating System of Finance! With this, you get the power you need, the freedom you want, and the security you must have.

The Problem

If you are in the financial sector, you know that it is very important to be able to visualize everything on one screen when interacting with multiple applications. We usually tend to arrange windows over and over, but that takes time, and our applications do not work with each other, nor do they share all data between them by nature. Most importantly, we have to try to make sure all of these apps are secure!

The Solution

Platform API of course!

What is the OpenFin Platform API?

It's a software that will help you build desktop platforms at the speed of light. The Platform API will also facilitate the work of creating a merged user experience across the multiple applications.

“The Platform API is for central architecture teams who want to provide web apps with a unified desktop experience and common look & feel.” - OpenFin Engineer

Key Features of the OpenFin Platform API

Layout management (e.g. window drag-and-drop and tabbing)
Customization of window look & feel
Styling via CSS
URL for loading the title bar window
Customization of all Platform APIs (behaviors)
Save and restore your window view.
Window level context (different from FDC3)
“Smart” Manifests to describe platforms via a single .JSON file

The Powerful Gridlayout

One of my favorite features is their grid layout. This feature has helped me reduce the amount of time it takes to develop an app. It can get pretty complicated to create dynamic grids that work with internal and external windows, by dragging and dropping. Now, if you see it from the end user point of view, this is an awesome idea, because the grid is customizable!

Now, I know what you are thinking. And no, you don't need to ask the developer to change the layout of the application. You, as an end user, can change the layout as well. This gives every end user the opportunity to have customs views of their apps that best fit their needs, and grow their productivity.

As a developer, I believe this is a huge benefit, since I don't have to worry about writing the code for this dynamic grid, nor do I need to worry about customizing the layout for each end user or client, which allows me to focus on the actual applications that will be used inside of the Platform API.

Because a Grid layout is not enough

The Platform API gives you the ability to power up your platform not only with custom layouts, but also with tabs! As a developer, I can develop my applications used inside of the platform with the assurance that they can be grouped together on tabs. And one of the coolest things is that you can customize them! If you are an end user of the platform, there are so many benefits here. E.g You can group the tabs by colors, where each color represents windows that belong to a certain group. This is huge. I have seen monitors of people working in the financial sector with 20 open windows and sometimes, users get lost in this. It's hard to manage what's going on.

Your perfect setup...always

So while working with the Platform API, I found out that you can save the current platform setup. This is an amazing feature. When working with dynamic layout, having to re-arrange things every time the code compiles can become very tedious. Now, imagine the benefits of this for the end users!

As a developer, you can easily retrieve the existing snapshot of your saved platform by using the applySnapshot method.

platform.applySnapshot(mySnapshot, {closeExistingWindows: true});

Thanks to this, you don't have to worry about losing the perfect setup that took you time to arrange. The setup will be always the same as long as you want to apply the saved snapshot!

Advanced workflows

The Platform API allows you to get the current context of your window. Thanks to this, you can easily save it into the platform's snapshots to re-use the context when the aplySnapShot method is called.

#The Core Now, let's take a closer look at the core of OpenFin’s Platform API and dive into some code examples. What is the core? It’s the manifest! I like to refer to it as the core because it is what carries all the information which constructs your Platform API project.

The manifest is located inside of a .json file AKA the app.json

#Let’s Get Started Let's create our manifest:

{
    "platform": {
        "uuid": "thisdot_platform"
    }
}

As you can see, this is the beginning of a new project using the Platform API. All you have to do is declare the "platform" object in your app.json.

Now let’s dive into the features to customize the application experience.

Customizing the Platform API Window

Customize your window's look and feel using css, and by adding defaultWindowOptions. You manifest will look as follows:

{
    "platform": {
        "uuid": "example_platform",
        "defaultWindowOptions": {
            "stylesheetUrl": "url-to-css-stylesheet"
        }
    }
}

##Take a look at this file to see what css selectors are available in the Platform API.

You can also replace the default windows that come with the Platform API. To do this, specify the url property as a window option in your manifest. You can import your custom HTML as follows:

...
"defaultWindowOptions": {
    "url": "url-to-html-file"
}
...

##When working with your custom window, all you have to do is consider the following:

This HTML file must specify a div component with the ID layout-container where you want the layout to be rendered. This will ensure that the window has a target to render the layout in. A url can also be specified in windowOptions in a snapshot, or when launching a snapshot via other methods.

Window Commands

OpenFin enables your Platform API application to work and feel like a native desktop application. That's why Openfin engineers further enhanced this experience by adding commands (with appropriate hotkeys) to help improve user experience.

These commands can be added to the platform object inside of your Platform API manifest.

...
"commands": [
  {
    "command": "stack.nextTab",
    "keys": "Ctrl+T"
  }
]
...

Window Snapshot

Another important property of the manifest is the snapshot. This property defines the structure of your window inside of the Platform. The snapshot needs to contain the window property where we will define the objects that go inside of it like views, and you can even define the structure of the grid by the layout property each window has. One cool feature about windows is that they can be created and destroyed by the end user, or developer, at any time.


{
  ...
    "snapshot": {
       "windows": [
            {
                "defaultWidth": 800,
                "defaultHeight": 600,
                "layout": {
                    // the structure of your grid
                }
            }
        ]
    }
  ...
}

Window Layout

This property defines the structure of your window. The layout works on a grid system. When working with the layouts, you have to add the content property inside of the layouts property. This content property contains an inner property called type. The values inside of the type value are the following:

row
column
stack
component

In the following code snippet, you can see how I'm using the the content property with the value stack as my type value. Another thing to notice is that there's content inside of other content. The Platform API allows us to have nested content to have the ability to give our window the structure we want.

...
"layout": {
  "content": [
    {
      "type": "stack",
      "content": [
        {
          "type": "component"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}
...

View ComponentState

Finally, another property that is worth mentioning is the componentState. This property gives us the option to provide more information about our view. Let's take a look at the following example.

...
"componentState": {
     "name": "example_labs_view",
     "url": "https://www.thisdot.co/"
 }
 ...

This view will render the website of https://www.thisdot.co inside of the view.

Take a look to this complete example:

{
  "snapshot": {
    "windows": [
      {
        "defaultWidth": 600,
        "defaultHeight": 600,
        "layout": {
          "content": [
            {
              "type": "stack",
              "content": [
                {
                  "type": "component",
                  "componentName": "view",
                  "componentState": {
                    "name": "component_A1",
                    "processAffinity": "ps_1",
                    "url": "https://www.example.com"
                  }
                },
                {
                  "type": "component",
                  "componentName": "view",
                  "componentState": {
                    "name": "component_A2",
                    "url": "https://cdn.openfin.co/embed-web/chart.html"
                  }
                }
              ]
            }
          ]
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

If you want to learn more about the manifest and the Platform API, take a look at the official resources:

Conclusion

Working with Platform API has so many wonderful benefits. It gives me the opportunity to create more flexible software with consistent design, better user experience, and greater security. The Platform API has helped me deliver products faster, with better quality, without compromising the security of my software. OpenFin is changing the way we interact with financial software. Don’t miss your chance to use it!

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

About the author(s)

Pato Vargas
Google Developer Expert on Angular and Web Technologies, Google Women Techmaker Ambassador, Auth0 Ambassador, Media Developer Expert at Cloudinary, Platzi Master Coach, and SpringBoard mentor.
@devpato @devpato

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Introduction to Zod for Data Validation

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There are limits to how much TypeScript can narrow down our data for us. Also, TypeScript is a tool for us developers. When we compile our code, our types are not available to the vanilla JavaScript. JavaScript can't validate that the data we actually use in our code matches what we thought we'd get when we wrote our TypeScript types unless you're willing to manually write code to perform those checks. This is where we can reach for a tool like Zod. With Zod, we can write data schemas. These schemas, in the simplest scenarios, look very much like TypeScript types. But we can do more with Zod than we can with TypeScript alone. Zod schemas let us create additional rules for data parsing and validation. A 20-character string that starts with user_id_? It's z.string().startsWith('user_id_').length(20). An integer between 1 and 5 inclusive? It's z.number().int().gte(1).lte(5). Zod's primitives give us many extra functions to be more specific about *exactly* what data we expect. Unlike TypeScript, Zod schemas aren't removed on compilation to JavaScript—we still have access to them! If our app receives some data, we can verify that it matches the expected shape by passing it to your Zod schema's parse function. You'll either get back your data in exactly the shape you defined in your schema, or Zod will give you an error to tell you what was wrong. Zod schemas aren't a replacement for TypeScript; rather, they are an excellent complement. Once we've defined our Zod schema, it's simple to derive a TypeScript type from it and to use that type as we normally would. But when we really need to be sure our data conforms to the schema, we can always parse the data with our schema for that extra confidence. Defining Data Schemas Zod schemas are the variables that define our expectations for the shape of our data, validate those expectations, and transform the data if necessary to match our desired shape. It's easy to start with simple schemas, and to add complexity as required. Zod provides different functions that represent data structures and related validation options, which can be combined to create larger schemas. In many cases, you'll probably be building a schema for a data object with properties of some primitive type. For example, here's a schema that would validate a JavaScript object representing an order for a pizza: ` Zod provides a number of primitives for defining schemas that line up with JavaScript primitives: string, number, bigint, boolean, date, symbol, undefined, and null. It also includes primitives void, any, unknown, and never for additional typing information. In addition to basic primitives, Zod can define object, array, and other native data structure schemas, as well as schemas for data structures not natively part of JavaScript like tuple and enum. The documentation contains considerable detail on the available data structures and how to use them. Parsing and Validating Data with Schemas With Zod schemas, you're not only telling your program what data should look like; you're also creating the tools to easily verify that the incoming data matches the schema definitions. This is where Zod really shines, as it greatly simplifies the process of validating data like user inputs or third party API responses. Let's say you're writing a website form to register new users. At a minimum, you'll need to make sure the new user's email address is a valid email address. For a password, we'll ask for something at least 8 characters long and including one letter, one number, and one special character. (Yes, this is not really the best way to write strong passwords; but for the sake of showing off how Zod works, we're going with it.) We'll also ask the user to confirm their password by typing it twice. First, let's create a Zod schema to model these inputs: ` So far, this schema is pretty basic. It's only making sure that whatever the user types as an email is an email, and it's checking that the password is at least 8 characters long. But it is *not* checking if password and confirmPassword match, nor checking for the complexity requirements. Let's enhance our schema to fix that! ` By adding refine with a custom validation function, we have been able to verify that the passwords match. If they don't, parsing will give us an error to let us know that the data was invalid. We can also chain refine functions to add checks for our password complexity rules: ` Here we've chained multiple refine functions. You could alternatively use superRefine, which gives you even more fine grained control. Now that we've built out our schema and added refinements for extra validation, we can parse some user inputs. Let's see two test cases: one that's bound to fail, and one that will succeed. ` There are two main ways we can use our schema to validate our data: parse and safeParse. The main difference is that parse will throw an error if validation fails, while safeParse will return an object with a success property of either true or false, and either a data property with your parsed data or an error property with the details of a ZodError explaining why the parsing failed. In the case of our example data, userInput2 will parse just fine and return the data for you to use. But userInput1 will create a ZodError listing all of the ways it has failed validation. ` ` We can use these error messages to communicate to the user how they need to fix their form inputs if validation fails. Each error in the list describes the validation failure and gives us a human readable message to go with it. You'll notice that the validation errors for checking for a valid email and for checking password length have a lot of details, but we've got three items at the end of the error list that don't really tell us anything useful: just a custom error of Invalid input. 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However, I find that this can lead to confusing situations when trying to import one or the other—my personal preference is to name the Zod schema with Schema at the end to make it clear which is which. Conclusion Zod is an excellent tool for easily and confidently asserting that the data you're working with is exactly the sort of data you were expecting. It gives us the ability to assert at runtime that we've got what we wanted, and allows us to then craft strategies to handle what happens if that data is wrong. Combined with the ability to infer TypeScript types from Zod schemas, it lets us write and run more reliable code with greater confidence....

Nov 15, 2024

7 mins

JavaScriptZod

Let's innovate together!

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Whether it's modernization or custom software solutions, our team of experts can guide you through best practices and how to build scalable, performant software that lasts.

Closer look at the DNA of the OpenFin Platform API

What is OpenFin?

The Problem

The Solution

What is the OpenFin Platform API?

Key Features of the OpenFin Platform API

The Powerful Gridlayout

Because a Grid layout is not enough

Your perfect setup...always

Advanced workflows

Customizing the Platform API Window

Window Commands

Window Snapshot

Window Layout

View ComponentState

Conclusion

Pato Vargas

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Introduction to Zod for Data Validation

Let's innovate together!

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Intro To Performance Analytics with Firebase

Introduction to Zod for Data Validation