Mashup Portal

Creating a Qlik Sense mashup from nothing can be a painful process, the prefabrication is intended to remove the headache of most of the difficult tasks related to creating an initial Qlik mashup application.
This application is a prefabricated QAP portal that will allow the follow functionality:

• Self-Contained (Standalone portal) with CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE functionality for :
  • Pages
  • Objects
  • Users
  • Security Groups
• User Self Service Authentication and Password Reset Functionality.
• Flexible Menu (based from pages)

Technology

The portal is a MERN (MongoDB, ExpressJs, ReactJs, NodeJs) Application. All the data for the application is saved in a Mongo Database which can be hosted on-premise or in the cloud. The frontend client was built with npx create-react-app and the qlik visualisations are displayed through QDT Components a JavaScript library created by (Qlik Demo Team) for mashups. Express Js facilitates the communication between the ReactJs Client and MongoDB with some API's performing CRUD actions against the database.

High Level App Structure

|--   mern-qlik-application         //Application Root
|-- --  client                      //ReactJS (Frontend)
|-- --  models                      //Mongoose Schema
|-- --  router                      //ExpressJS APIs 
|-- --  validation                  //Database Input Validation
|-- --  Server.js                   //Node.Js Epress App Entry File 

Setup

Install the backend api node modules

• npm install in the root directory mern-qlik-application

Install the frontend api node modules

• npm install --prefix client in the root directory mern-qlik-application

Update environmental Variable in the /config/keys_dev.js file

Development Variable	Description
mongoURI	- The MongoDB location url with the username, password and database
secretKey	- The Salt for the Encrypting the user password for passport.js
cryptr	- The Salt for encrypting the smpt password using the crypty npm lib

• The production key reference are in the /config/keys_prod file

To authenticate the Mashup with Qlik Sense certificate key in platform extended format (.PEM) need to be exported and placed in the config directory with the file must be named client_key.pem

Development Runtime

Once everything is set to start the development environment, in the root directory npm run any of the following

Command	Description
server	to start server.js with nodemon
client	to start the ReactJs Client application alone
ssl-client	to start the React Client application in https
dev	to concurrently start the server and the client together
dev-ssl	to concurrently start the server and the client together in https

Production Runtime

In the your production environment is it recommended to compress the ReactJs client directory When Deploying in Azure this can be automated for continuous builds. The server.js file is set to use the /client/build/index.html in production.