Portal structure

A portal is an interface through which users interact with your application. By applying the principles of modular design to your portals, you can create optimal work environments with greater flexibility and less effort.

Pega Platform applications use a modular UI which encourages prototyping, and design consistency. You can reuse out-of-the-box UI components, group them into structural clusters, or nest one component inside another.

For portals, the most basic structural component is the harness. Harnesses organize the structure of the user display. When you create a portal in App Studio, Pega Platform automatically creates an associated harness to contain the screen layout. If you design your portal in Dev Studio, you must manually create a harness and associate it with a portal.

Harnesses comprise sections. Each section defines the content of one part of a user interface, such as the navigation pane or a header. You can populate a section with properties and controls, and choose a template to organize the section in a consistent manner. Like harnesses, sections are reusable and support nesting – you can embed a section inside another section.