What is Design Editor Web app?

• 2-3 minutes to read

Design Editor is an ASP.NET application that provides a user interface for editing designs in a browser. Designs may be created from scratch, loaded from templates created in InDesign or Photoshop, or from state files created in Customer's Canvas (both templates and previously saved users' designs).

Where do I get the Design Editor?

There are several options for getting a Design Editor instance:

1. A cloud version. We will provide you with access to the Customer's Canvas BackOffice application to manage its data as well as URLs to Design Editor and other applications and services you may want to deal with.
2. An on-premises version. If you purchase this option, you will be able to download Design Editor from your account on our site and install it as explained below.
3. An instance on your infrastructure managed by us. This is the same as the on-premises version, but you don't have to install it yourself. Just provide us with access to your infrastructure and we will do it for you. Contact us if you are interested in this option.

Installation and maintenance

Since the Design Editor is an ASP.NET application, it should be installed on IIS server (Windows only). All information about the Design Editor you may need to know as an IT Ops specialist can be found at the Installation and maintenance section.

Here are the most popular subjects:

• If you are planning your infrastructure and wondering what kind of machine Design Editor requires, refer the System requirements.

• The process of installation is described in the Installing and updating Design Editor section.

• A reference for the configuration files can be found at Design Editor configuration (the primary config is AppSettings.config).

• You can find best practice recommendations for configuring your server in the Managing applications section.

• If you encounter any problems, refer the Troubleshooting section.

Integrating Design Editor to a frontend app

So, you have an instance of Design Editor up and running, and you now need to display the editor at a frontend application. There are two ways to do this:

1. Use the IFrame API JavaScript library.
2. Use the UI Framework and create a configuration with a design-editor widget, which is a wrapper around IFrameApi.js.

If you decide to use IFrame API, here you can find some guidelines depending on the installation type:

• Self-hosted Design Editor
• Cloud Design Editor

If you rather use UI Framework, refer the Working with Design Editor UIF tutorial.

REST API

To make calls to Design Editor APIs, you should just send HTTP requests as explained in the appropriate articles. Most of the APIs requires authentication. The primary way to authenticate is to send the API key, however, certain APIs require more sophisticated token-based authentication. You can learn how authentication works with Design Editor in the Authentication article.

If you are using Design Editor standalone (not connected to the cloud), the following APIs can be used to manipulate assets and user data:

• Designs and Mockups
• Fonts
• State files
• User uploads

If you are connected to the cloud version of Customer's Canvas, it is better to use APIs of What are Personalization Platform services instead.

Another important API is Personalized rendering. Use it whenever you want to generate images based on the state files or templates without an editor, for example, variable data printing scenarios, generating multiple designs based on the same user data, and other similar tasks.