Basic concepts

UI applications allows you easily building custom user interfaces to perform manual tasks required for your data integration and data quality applications. Also, UI applications are so powerful that you can go beyond data integration/quality tasks and build any internal tool for your organization. Examples of an UI application:

Upload a file and trigger a scenario to process the file.
View a table in a database. Create a new record in the table, edit or delete existing records. It is useful for example for tables that contains some kind of manually created configurations such as a list of emails for sending notifications, a list of order ids to exclude from automatic processing, various mappings (e.g. Unit of Measure (UoM) mapping), etc.
Build a custom UI for a steward to review the result of various data quality tasks such as deduplication (akd match and merge), data matching (e.g. match UPS shipments to orders), data validation, data enrichment, etc.

You develop UI applications by first creating a parametrized application implementation and then creating an instance of the implementation providing values of the parameters. You can only open UI app instance, not UI app implementation. The separation of UI application implementation and its instances allows you to export and distribute (directly or via the InfoLink marketplace) parametrized UI application implementations as bundles. The users will import the bundle containing your UI application implementation and then create an instance of it providing customer-specific parameters. When you release a new version of the implementation, the user can upgrade the imported bundle thus upgrading only the implementation and keep on using the parameters defined in the instance.

UI application implementation is defined in an UI specification that is created in the UI Specifications subsection of the UI Apps section of the Specifications of the application. UI application implementation can use one or more windows defined in UI window specifications in the same UI Specifications subsection. One of the windows is spacified as Start window in the UI specification.

UI application instance is defined in an UI app specification that is created in the UI Apps section of the Specifications of the application. UI app specification defines UI application implementation used (by providing the name of the corresponding UI specification) and values of the parameters.

Because names of all specifications must be unique in an application, it would be a goood idea to use some naming convention for UI, UI window and UI app specifications. We use the following naming convention:

Prefix all UI-related specifications with UI.
Name UI specifications as UI<app implementation name>. For example: UICustomers.
Name UI window specifications as UI<app implementation name>-<1-based index>-<window name>. For example: UICustomers-1-Main. Using the same prefix UI<app name> allows you to group UI and UI windows in the navigation tree together. Using an index allows you to display windows in the navigation tree in particular order.
Name UI app specifications as UI<app name>App. For example: UICustomersApp.