Service Portal contains two parts: a framework and a portal. The framework is composed of a set of APIs, Angular services, directives, and tools that help to build portals. The portal is a group of pages linked by page IDs.

Figure 1. Service Portal overview diagram
Diagram of Service Portal and how pages and widgets fit inside it

After you enter a URL, the framework uses the suffix and picks the appropriate portal to determine the theme and configurations. Then it loads the configured default portal homepage unless the URL has a specified ID.

Each widget added to a page becomes its own instance. A widget instance is basically the application of a widget in a page. Because widgets are reusable and can appear on different pages to do different things, the manifestation of a widget on a page is referred to as a Widget Instance. The page loads with content represented by widgets.

Widget instances get their logic from the base widget template, client scripts, server scripts, and depending on the widget, CSS.