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Portal Assistant

The Portal Assistant is a chat built into the Portal Designer. It can see the portal you are building and make changes for you from a plain description. Ask it to "add a table of open orders to this page, sorted by due date", and it adds the data source, the table and the columns.

It works on the pages, widgets and data of the portal draft you are editing. Designs, layouts and themes are not covered yet. Work on those directly in the designer.

Before you start

Two things need to be in place:

  • Your role must have the AI permission. See Roles.
  • At least one AI Integration must be set up in the workspace.

Then open the assistant from the AI Assistant button in the designer's ribbon.

Conversations

Each conversation belongs to the portal draft you were editing when you started it. The assistant only ever edits the draft, never a published version.

The model dropdown at the top of the chat picks which AI Integration to use. Each conversation remembers its model choice.

What the assistant can do

Every time you send a message, the assistant automatically gets an overview of the portal: its pages and navigation modules, the page you currently have selected, and the data sources on it. You don't have to explain your setup.

It works on three things:

  • Pages. List, create and delete pages in the draft, and change their name, route, icon and whether they show in navigation.
  • Widgets. Browse the widget catalogue, look up a widget's full configuration, and add, update, move or remove widgets anywhere on a page. That includes inside containers with named regions such as tabs and sidebar sections.
  • Data. List and inspect a page's data sources, add a new one (a SQL query against a workspace database, or inline JSON for quick sample data), update or remove one, browse the workspace's external databases, and manage the page parameters that data sources and widgets bind to.

The assistant can also use AI Skills. Global skills are always included. External Database skills are included when a page's data source targets that database. Report-scoped skills don't apply to portal conversations.

Tips

A few habits make the assistant much more useful:

  • Select the right page first. The assistant sees the page you have selected. Go to the page you want to change before you send a message.
  • Select a widget for targeted changes. Click the widget on the canvas so the assistant knows which one you mean.
  • Be specific. Instead of "make the table nicer", try "widen the customer column and sort by total descending".
  • Name the data source. Widgets bind to page data as {$data.<name>}. Tell the assistant which data source a widget should use, or ask it to list the page's data sources first.
  • One page at a time. The assistant works best on a single page. For changes across several pages, work through them one by one.