Slate Standard Tour Guide Portal
- 16 Dec 2024
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Slate Standard Tour Guide Portal
- Updated 16 Dec 2024
- 5 minute read
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🔔 Important!This example is a legacy portal that uses POST methods, which are no longer maintained or supported by Technolutions. Use an embedded form to store portal data instead.
Slate provides a standard Tour Guide portal that can be imported using Suitcase and edited in an institution's database. This portal is configured to use dataset records for tour guide information.
📝 NoteFor the context of this article, the portal assumes that tour guides will be dataset records, not Slate users. Tour guides will be added as related records to events in Slate.
Tour Guide Dataset
If the institution already has a dataset for student volunteers or ambassadors and wishes to add tour guides to an existing dataset, records should have a custom field for role. This field can then be leveraged to restrict access to the portal if desired. Prior to building the portal, an institution must have created a custom dataset for the records that will be using the portal.
Users should also be familiar with related records in Events and Scheduler.
Tour Events
Prior to building the portal, an institution should create the appropriate event templates and events. We recommend creating a specific event template for tours.
Create an event template.
Create events from the template.
Ensure events are saved in a folder.
Portal Scope and Security
After importing the portal, the Scope and Security Type will be set to Anonymous/Guest. This setting must be changed before use by taking the following steps:
On the main portal editor page, click Edit in the top-right.
Change the Scope to Dataset.
Select the relevant dataset, then Save.
If you need to restrict access to the portal, click Edit again to set the Restrict Access filter(s).
Portal Queries
The only query that must be updated after import is the Default: Potential Tours query. All queries are described below, along with explanations of ways they may be updated.
Default: Potential Tours
This query determines which tours are shown to the tour guides as available to sign up for. The Logged in Record Has Not Already Signed Up for Event filter can be left as-is, but you will want to consider each the remaining filters:
Event Has Less than 2 Related Records: Consider the maximum number of tour guides who should be allowed to sign up for a tour. If it’s more or less than 2, update this filter.
The two Start Date filters define the range of dates that tour signups are available, and should be adjusted to your process.
Update the Folder and Template filters to match the tour events.
Default: Assigned Tours
By default, this query returns all events that happen today or in the future where the logged in record is one of the related records. If you allow these dataset records to be related records for multiple types of events, you may wish to add additional filters to limit the list of events by Template or Folder.
Pop-Up: Tour Details
When clicking on a tour in the portal, whether an assigned tour or potential tour, this query will return information about the specific event.
The allow_cancellation export can be modified to prevent tour guides from removing themselves from an event under certain circumstances, for example if it’s too close to the event date.
Custom SQL Queries
🔔 Important!Custom SQL queries and POST methods are legacy features that are not actively maintained or supported by Technolutions.
There are two custom SQL queries in this portal to allow for POST methods. The POST: Join Tour query saves the dataset record as a related record for the selected event, while the POST: Unjoin Tour query removes the dataset record as a related record for the selected event.
Portal Views
You may also edit the views to display any additional data points added to the queries, or remove items, or reformat in a different visual layout, etc.
Default
This view contains two tables. "Tour Guide Assignments" builds a table in static content. "Potential Tours" uses the Table Widget. As only one table widget can be used per view, this portal includes both ways of using Liquid markup and tables within a single view.
Social media, content blocks, or other information may be added as desired to the Default view.
Pop-Up: Tour Details
This view is used for the pop-up after clicking on a tour, either under Assigned Tour or Potential Tours. Liquid markup also conditionally displays the Sign Up or Cancel Sign Up button. Additional details may be added to this pop-up as desired.
Portal Methods
The various methods in the Tour Guide portal include GET methods, which call data from queries and display them in views, as well as POST methods, which save or remove the tour guide assignment.
Some methods have actions, while others do not. The methods without actions are called immediately upon accessing the portal.
Default
This method is connected to three queries:
Default: Logged in Guide
Default: Assigned Tours
Default: Potential Tours
This method has no action, as it runs immediately when the portal loads and is connected to the "Default" view.
Pop-Up: Tour Details
This method is connected to the Pop-Up: Tour Details Detail query.
This method has the action of tour_details and is associated with the Pop-Up: Tour Details view. The output type is AJAX Popup/No Branding to avoid duplicate branding within the pop-up.
POST Methods
🔔 Important!POST methods are a legacy feature and are not actively maintained or supported by Technolutions.
The two POST methods are not associated with views, as they do not display data. Each method has a different action:
tour_assigntour_unassign
These methods are called from the pop-up view when tour guides are joining or unjoining events.
Testing
To test the Tour Guide portal, you will need to have events set up and an example Tour Guide dataset record. You may also wish to create several additional tour guide dataset records to test signing up for events to test the limits on sign-ups.
To view the portal, go to the internal portal URL, click Impersonate, and select your test tour guide.
Once in the portal, ensure that you see the expected tours. Click on different tours to view the pop-up and test saving an assignment. You can always return to the Portal Editor to make any changes to the queries and views as desired.
Test the entire interview process, including:
Joining a tour
Unjoining a tour
Maxing out the number of related records that have signed up
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