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Portal configuration and captions

Business Portals lets you manage portal-wide settings and multilingual portal text in Business Central. This removes the need to edit the portal XML files for these settings.

Info

The settings belong to a portal, not to an individual dataset. Dataset captions and dataset configuration remain in their existing dataset setup.

Before you start

  • Make sure your Business Portals version supports configuration unification. The new actions are available for portals on version 2.7.0.0 or later.
  • Make sure you have permission to change Business Portals setup.
  • Have the portal asset paths ready if you want to change logos, images, videos, or the favicon.

Open the portal configuration

  1. Search for Business Portals in Business Central.
  2. Open Portals and select the portal you want to configure.
  3. On the portal card, open Portal Configuration.
  4. Change the required values and close the page.

The Portal Configuration page contains the following types of settings:

General and appearance

Use these settings to control the portal title, light and dark theme medias, and the assets used by the portal:

  • portal title
  • portal and login logos
  • company logos
  • app logo
  • light and dark background images
  • background video and whether it is shown
  • favicon

Login and sign-up behavior

Use these settings to enable sign-up and decide which registration values are required. The available required fields include: - salutation - first name - last name - email address - address - postal code - city, telephone - mobile number - company - customer number - password - password confirmation - GDPR consent - CAPTCHA - job title.

The page also includes account lock behavior after 4 incorrect login attempts and the lock duration in minutes.

Other portal behavior

The page also contains settings for: - light design - script injection - app requests - debug level - log-file retention.

Use debug and script-injection settings only when instructed by your administrator or Simova support. Keeping log files for too long can increase storage usage.

Configure portal captions

  1. Start as Business Portals Administrator in role center.
  2. Click on Portal.
  3. Select the portal whose captions you want to adjust. Click on the portal name in the list to open the general settings page.
  4. Click on Portal Captions action button.
  5. Select the caption group, such as Login, Password Validation, Reset Password, Sign Up, or Alerts.
  6. Open a caption to edit its translations.
  7. Enter the text for each configured portal language and save the changes.

Captions are stored per portal and per language. If a language is missing, add it to the portal language setup first. Captions not configured in this page continue to use the available default text.

Portal captions cover common portal text such as login labels, password messages, sign-up text, company selection, CAPTCHA, confirmation messages, timeout messages, and application text. Dataset-specific captions are still maintained in the dataset caption pages.

Configure the password policy

The password regular expression and its validation messages remain in Business Portals Setup, under the password settings. The Portal Captions page contains the multilingual text shown for password validation, but it does not replace the password expression itself.

When changing a regular expression, test it with representative passwords. An invalid expression or an expression that is too restrictive can prevent users from registering or changing their password. The validation message should explain the rule in language users understand.

When changes take effect

Caption changes are written to the portal language configuration when the portal configuration is published or refreshed. Portal configuration changes are generated into the portal configuration files when the portal is started or updated. The Portal Configuration page displays a message when a server restart is needed; restart the portal service by stopping the portal and then starting it again before testing changes that require it.

Existing XML configurations and upgrades

Legacy XML configuration files continue to be used for portals that does not yet support configuration unification (Version < 2.7.0.0). For supported portals, Business Portals generates the unified configuration from the settings stored in Business Central. The portal version determines which configuration format is used.

Tip

Keep a copy of the existing XML files before upgrading a production portal. After the upgrade, it can be used for review or a backup of the Portal Configuration and Portal Captions pages and test login, registration, password validation, language selection, and portal images.

Warning

Some language with special characters might break upon updating. This is cause by Business Central internal parsing. It is still recommended to do a backup to be able to restore the language manually.

The portal upgrade will automatically import the language configuration from previous the old language configurations format.

Info

NAV user can still upgrade to the version 2.7.0.0+. However configuration unification only works in Business Central, so there will be no new steps for NAV environment.

Troubleshooting

The new actions are not visible

Check the portal version. The unified configuration actions are shown only for portal version 2.7.0.0 or later. Also check your Business Portals permissions.

A change is not visible in the portal

Save the page, publish or refresh the portal, and restart the portal service by stopping the portal and then starting it again if Business Central requested it. Clear the browser cache when checking changed images or captions.

An image or video is missing

Check that the path is correct, the file exists at that location, and the portal host can access it. Check the light and dark paths separately.

A caption is not translated

Check that the language is configured for the portal and that the caption was edited for that language. Dataset captions and portal captions are maintained separately.