Selector Components & Products

The Selection Engine powering Finanz tools selectors is a distributed web application comprising an interactive user interface and a server-resident data processing engine.

The finanz tools product suite also includes a family of online content management Composer Tools, and a presentation microsite for controlling access to your finanz tools applications by your facility and content managers and also by your end users.

Finanz tools selectors comprise a server-side component, and a client-side user interface. The server-side component analyses requests for service and decides which user interface to serve based on the user's browser and preferences. The normal choices include:

• standard HTML web pages enhanced with Javascript to provide a very high degree of interactivity on the client's computer without requiring continual server-side support. This user interface is AJAX based and utilises Javascript running on the client to interact with the various services which run on the server. This interaction is accomplished through the use of an XmlHttpRequest.
  
  
• a non-interactive Web Application. Where Javascript is not available or is not enabled, as is often the case with search engine web crawlers and for certain disabled users, the finanz tools user interface employs only pure HTML web pages. This interface is provided as a fall back in case a client is not running a modern or known browser and is suitable for search engines web crawlers to traverse. This user interface connects to a Web Application written in Java/JSP that utilises standard Java calls to the various services.
  

Where the browser kind is one for which we have not conducted full Javascript tests, such as may occur when new browsers first emerge or when a web crawler visits an finanz tools application, we serve the Web Application user interface.

Note that in all cases, Java is only employed as a server-side technology and is not required on the end user's computer. The choices described above are the standard options built into the base product. We can however develop and supply user interfaces in any other client-side technology preferred by a client making use of products and technologies such as Macromedia Flash, Microsoft .NET and client-side Java.

The server-side component of finanz tools can be packaged to deliver Web Services to other client and server-side systems and components. In that case none of our user interfaces would be used, permitting developers to apply our Web Services without having to redevelop equivalent functionality. 

The product suite also includes a family of content management composer tools for setting up and maintaining your Finanz tools applications:

• Application Manager - this tool is used to create, copy, edit or delete an finanz tools application.
  
  
• Category Manager - this tool is used to create, edit and delete the categories of new and existing finanz tools applications.
  
  
• Item Manager - this tool is used to create, edit, and delete items, such as products, in your finanz tools applications.
  
  
• Attribute Manager - this tool is used to create, edit, and delete descriptive and qualifying attributes of items. Adding a rich set of attributes to your items enables your customers to compare them by feature, to sort them by attribute values, and to select them by qualifying values. Attributes can be linked to categories for use as selection criteria.

Finally, the product suite includes a management microsite that can be used to:

• provide restricted access to your finanz tools applications, either online or on your intranet.
  
  
• grant and control editing rights for content managers.
  
  
• provide user management and auditing facilities. This enables you to set up user accounts for defined periods, grant access and assign ownership of finanz tools applications to users, monitor user activity and many other functions.

This product is available for license for use online and on corporate intranets.