Building Products in Rational
Introduction
Rational is powered by a data analysis and visualization platform, providing you with JavaScript-based notebooks to create dynamic, interactive pages for your products. As a Rational user, you can create and name one or many products, adding notebooks and other assets such as HTML and CSS files within the workspace area to shape the end-user experience post-subscription.
Notebooks in Rational BI
These notebooks work like a mix of a spreadsheet and a code editor, where you can write code to manipulate your data and generate visualizations, and see the results in real time. This instant feedback makes it easier to experiment and iterate on your data analysis, and lets you create complex interactive dashboards and reports with minimal code.
Data Handling
Data is the backbone of the subscription products offered in Rational. To ensure efficient data management, we provide two primary ways of handling data:
Uploading Data Files
You can upload Excel spreadsheets or other tabular data files, which the system will convert into an SQLite database. This database is then transmitted to the browser and executed via a WebAssembly instance of SQLite. This allows immediate access to data from within the notebook, enabling you to build interactive graphics, charts, and tables based on SQL queries to a database loaded in the browser's memory.
Database Connector
If your data exceeds a few megabytes—more than can be efficiently transmitted over a network—you can use a Database Connector. This feature connects to a remote data store that you manage. While typically SQL databases, other data stores using different query languages are also compatible. Rational offers built-in connectors for common databases such as MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL. By inputting the appropriate connection information and credentials, Rational acts as a secure proxy to your database, ensuring that only subscribed users gain access to the data.
Overview of Products
Products in Rational are entities that map to the subscription offerings your customers can access. By associating a Rational product with a Stripe product, you can manage the customer subscription lifecycle to grant product access. You can associate each product in Rational with one 'Test' product and one 'Live' product. You can also create products that don't require a subscription, visible to all registered users on the site.
Accessible Products
When a user logs into the system, they are shown a list of accessible products based on their subscriptions. This list can include one or more subscription products, plus any number of non-subscription products. If the user has access to multiple products, they're redirected to a landing screen to select the product they wish to access. You have the ability to configure each product to require a subscription or not and to determine whether it should appear on the selection screen.