Key Concepts

A handful of terms turn up everywhere in ActiveManage. Learn these and the rest of the platform is much easier to navigate — you'll know what's being referenced and how the pieces fit together. This article is a concept-first introduction; for an alphabetical reference, see the Glossary.

Datastore

A datastore is ActiveManage's name for a database table. Every record your application stores lives in a datastore. You can create as many as you need, each with its own field structure, permissions, and behaviour.

Where standard database tables are bare — rows and columns and nothing else — ActiveManage datastores come with auto-generated forms, browse views, audit logs, soft-delete semantics, tenant scoping, and API exposure baked in. You define the table once and get all that for free.

Fields and Field Types

A datastore has fields (columns). Each field has a type that controls how it's rendered on forms, how it's validated, and how it's stored — Text Box, Number, Date, Dropdown, File Upload, Conditional Form, and around 50 others.

Field types determine what configuration options are available when you add a field to a table. A Number field reveals Min Value, Max Value, Allow Decimals, and Units. A Dropdown Box (Searchable) (DB) reveals Data Source, Option Sorting, Display Format, Parent ID Field, and many more. Picking the right field type is one of the most important decisions when building a datastore.

Browse View

A browse view is how datastore rows are listed for end users. You control which columns appear, what filters and search options are available, and which row-level action buttons ("Edit", "View", custom actions) are exposed.

Different roles can have different browse views of the same datastore. Sales sees one set of columns and actions on the customers table; Customer Service sees a different set on the same table. One backing datastore, many tailored views.

User Input View (UIV)

A UIV is a multi-stage submission form. The user fills it in ("stage 1"), then the resulting record moves through one or more approval stages, each with its own assignee, visible fields, allowed actions, timeouts, and email notifications.

UIVs are how you build approval-style workflows in ActiveManage — purchase requests, leave applications, support tickets, change-approval, customer onboarding. They handle email sending, audit trails, and reminders without you writing any code.

Permissions and Security Groups

Every datastore, field, and row can be permission-controlled. Permissions are granted to security groups, not to individual users. Users are added to groups individually or automatically via registration rules.

Groups can be composed (a user can be in multiple groups), and their effective permissions are the union of every group they belong to. There's no "deny" mechanism — permissions are grant-only.

Tenant

If multi-tenancy is enabled, each customer of your platform is a tenant. Tenants have isolated data — either by tenantid column on shared tables (cheap, simple) or by separate physical databases per tenant (more isolation, more management).

Multi-tenancy is opt-in — many ActiveManage installs run single-tenant and never use the feature. For SaaS products serving multiple customer organisations, it's essential.

Architect Panel

The Architect Panel (reached from the admin panel sidebar) is the master configuration hub. Every feature you can build with ActiveManage is reachable from here, organised by category — Security, Forms, Data, Layout, Activity, Configuration, and others. If you're configuring anything, you'll almost always start here.

Mini-form

Mini-forms are platform-shipped fragments of conditional form logic that turn up wherever certain options need follow-on fields. For example, when configuring a Dropdown's Option Sorting, picking "By Field" reveals a Sort Field Name input — that reveal is driven by a mini-form. You don't typically configure mini-forms yourself; they're the building blocks behind the platform's own UIs.

Task Engine

The Task Engine runs scheduled jobs — anything that should happen automatically on a cadence rather than in response to a user action. Maintenance jobs, recurring imports, billing runs, cleanup, scheduled reports. Defined via the Tasks admin; each task has a schedule and a handler.