Installation and maintenance
In this part of documentation, we will focus on IT administration tasks in regards to Design Editor. For the developer's information, refer to these sections:
- Design Editor Web API - for backend developers
- Design Editor IFrame API JS library - for frontend developers
What is Design Editor for IT Ops?
From the IT Ops department perspective, Design Editor is an ASP.NET application, which should be installed on IIS server (Windows only). It consists of both static JS code and ASP.NET binaries.
The process of installation is described in the Installing and updating Design Editor section.
Local vs cloud modes
Design Editor can work as a standalone application or it can be connected to Customer's Canvas cloud infrastructure. In the former case, all data such as designs, fonts, images, user's results, uploads, etc. are stored on the same server with the application. You have to take it into consideration and make sure that your disk is large enough to hold this data.
Although the on-premises instance does not impose limitations on the size of design files it can work with, it is not recommended to use files larger than 300-500 MB. Large files take up a lot of your server's resources and reduce its efficiency, and downloading and rendering such files will take a very long time.
If your instance is connected to the Customer's Canvas cloud, the data is stored in the Asset Storage service. In this case, the application uses mostly the computing resources. It still keeps some files locally, such as a file cache, however, all the important data is located in the cloud environment. At the moment, the limit for uploading your design files to the cloud is 512MB.
Note
If you have neither a Customer's Canvas account nor deployed an on-premises or private cloud version of Customer's Canvas, you will use Design Editor in a local mode. Until noted explicitly, it is assumed that the local mode is used across the entire documentation.