Hiding confidential information in Custom Widgets

Custom Widgets might contain confidential information, like the credentials of your BizTalk360 Service Account. Of course, you don’t want this information to be revealed in plain text in your widgets. To hide such confidential information, you can use Placeholders.

Beside using Placeholders to hide confidential information, you can also use them for providing frequently used data to your Custom Widgets. Think of for example, the BizTalk360 EnvironmentId, which is a value which often needs to be provided to Custom Widgets. By creating a Placeholder for the EnvironmentId, you can easily re-use it and you don’t need to search for such values, each time you are creating a Custom Widget which needs such a value.

In this article becomes shown, how you can use Placeholders in a Custom Widget. The Custom Widget which was created in this article, will be used to create placeholders for the following fields:

• BizTalk360 Service Account Name and password
• BizTalk360 EnvironmentId

Creating and using Placeholders exists of the following steps:

1. Creating Placeholders
2. Applying Placeholders

Creating Placeholders

To be able to create Placeholders and use them in a Custom Widget, you need to open a Custom Widget. As mentioned, for this scenario, the ‘All disabled Receive Locations’ widget will be used.

1. Open BizTalk360 and navigate to the Settings section of the product
2. In the Settings section, click ‘Custom Widgets’, and from the list of Custom Widgets, click the ‘Edit’ button of the ‘All disabled Receive Locations’ widget

3. The screen shows a hyperlink called ‘Insert placeholder’. Click on that hyperlink, to be able to create, maintain and use Placeholders. Currently, no Placeholders are created

4. Click the ‘Create a placeholder’ button, after which a screen appears where you can maintain the placeholders
5. Click the ‘Add Placeholder’ button to create a placeholder. The details of the BizTalk360 account can be entered in the text boxes which show up

The screen enables you to provide the following:

• Name – The name of the widget. After the placeholder has been created, this name will be used, to add the placeholder to a Custom Widget
• Value – The value of the placeholder. While entering a value, characters are immediately hidden
• Description – Here you can provide a description of the purpose of this placeholder

Further, you can use the green checkmark to save the placeholder or the red cross to abort creating the placeholder.

6. Create placeholders based on the following table:

When the placeholders are created, the screen will look like below:

The values of the placeholders can be viewed by hovering over the eye icon next to each value.

7. Finish maintaining the placeholders by clicking the big green checkmark

In the next step, we will see how you can use the created placeholders in a custom widget.

Applying Placeholders

After creating placeholders, it is a simple step to use these placeholders in your Custom Widget(s). In this step, we’ll show how you can achieve this. Follow below steps:

1. With the Placeholders screen still open, you will also see the Custom Widget to which you want to apply the placeholders, including the 3 fields for which we created placeholders.

In the widget, clear the values of all three fields, but leave the quotes (and the semi-colon). After that, that part of the Custom Widget will look like this:

2. Next, move the cursor in between the double quotes of the field ‘username’.
3. To apply a placeholder to that field ‘username’, you must click on that placeholder in the Placeholder screen. In this case, we need the BizTalk360 account, so click the ‘BT360Account’ placeholder.
4. Repeat the previous step for the fields ‘password’ and ‘environmentId’
5. Once the three placeholders have been applied, that section of the Custom Widget will look like below:

6. Click the ‘Save’ button to save the Custom Widget which now uses the placeholders

If all steps have been performed correctly, the Custom Widget still works fine, but it won’t reveal the confidential BizTalk360 Service Account.