Your own domain

Publish an app as a portal gave the Service desk portal an address that belongs to your Parsware installation. A customer's support site usually wants one that belongs to the customer: support.northwind.com, not something under your platform's name. This article adds one, on the Portal service desk sample, samples/solutions/portal-service-desk.

A name you type is only a claim

Open the solution, choose Portals, and open the portal. Under Your own domains, press Add a domain and type the whole name a visitor would type. Here it's support.northwind.example:

Nothing happens yet, and that's deliberate. Anybody who may edit a portal can type any name into that box. If typing were enough, they could point a portal at a domain that isn't theirs, and the platform would start serving it. So a name is a claim until you prove it.

The record that proves it

Press Save and open the portal again. Under the domain there's now a TXT record to publish: a name and a value, each with its own Copy button, because they're going to somebody else, usually whoever runs your DNS.

The value is a code made for this portal and this domain. Only somebody who can publish a record inside northwind.example can put it there, which is exactly the question that needs answering.

Press Check now before the record exists and the platform says so: We have looked and it is not there yet. That's an answer, not an error, and it's the usual one for the first few minutes. Press it again later; checking costs nothing.

Verified

Once the record is published, Check now finds it:

The list of portals counts it too, so you can see which of several domains are working without opening each portal:

The portal at its new address

A visitor who opens support.northwind.example gets the service desk: the same pages, the same sign-in, the same cases for their company.

The platform's own address keeps working beside it. Links the platform writes itself, a sign-up confirmation or a company invitation, still use that one, because it always works.

And a name nobody has proved

To show the other half, we claimed a second name, help.northwind.example, and didn't publish its record. The panel shows one of each:

Pointed at the platform, the unproved name reaches nothing:

That's the whole safety of the feature. Two portals may claim the same name, and whichever one's code is in DNS is the one that gets it. Once a domain is verified for one portal, no other portal can verify it.

What you still need outside Parsware

Two records, both in your DNS: the TXT record above, and a CNAME pointing the name at your Parsware installation. Verification proves the name is yours; the CNAME is what sends visitors here. If a verified domain doesn't load, check the CNAME. The panel's help page, Use your own domain, lists the other things that go wrong.

What we fixed

• The record had no Copy. The name and the 32-character code were plain text, so the only way to hand them to a DNS administrator was to select them, and a half-selected code is a record that never matches. Each now has its own Copy.
• "Verified" was nearly invisible in dark mode. The one line saying the domain works was a dark green on a dark panel, and read as disabled. It uses the platform's success colour now.

Try it

Import samples/solutions/portal-sign-in-kit, then samples/solutions/portal-service-desk, and publish Service desk. Add a domain you control, save, and publish the TXT record it shows with your DNS provider. Press Check now until it turns green, then point the name at your installation with a CNAME.

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