Manual / Getting started

Signing in

Most of this app needs no account at all. Two parts of it are protected — the confidential driver roster, and the diversion register — and those need one. This page is what to expect at each of those doors.

What you are looking at

Look at the right-hand end of the top bar.

• Nothing there at all. This deployment has no accounts, so there is nothing to sign in to and nothing is locked. That is the normal state of a training or demonstration copy. Skip the rest of this page.
• A Sign in button. This deployment has accounts. You are not signed in.
• Your username, with your role beside it in smaller text, and a Sign out button. You are signed in. If your account is an administrator's, an Admin Console button sits between them.

Pressing Sign in opens a card with the product's logo, the heading Sign in, a line saying why it appeared, and two fields: Username and Password. The line normally reads "The operational roster is confidential and requires an account." When the card was raised by something you clicked, the line says what that was instead.

What you can do without signing in

Everything that is built from the published timetable, plus everything the app publishes about itself:

• the whole Map Explorer — routes, stops, live buses and every overlay this deployment has;
• the whole Timetable tab;
• the ⚙ Settings panel, the version chip and the What's new dialog;
• this manual.

Two things are closed:

• Operations Analysis is built from the confidential roster and needs an account with the ops role.
• Diversions needs an account to read at all — any role will do — and the ops role to change anything.

Both wear a small padlock while you are signed out. Clicking either raises the Sign in card, with a line saying which one you were reaching for. Sign in and the app takes you straight there, including when you got to the app by following somebody's link to a particular record.

Getting an account, and losing one

Accounts are created by an administrator. There is no sign-up, and the card says so at the bottom. There is also no way to change your own password — if you forget it, an administrator resets it, and that reset signs you out everywhere you were signed in.

If you get it wrong, the card says "Incorrect username or password." under the fields. Keep getting it wrong and it says "Too many attempts. Try again in N min." instead, and the wait doubles each time up to an hour.

A sign-in lasts about a fortnight on the browser you did it in, unless the people who set this deployment up chose a shorter life. It can also end sooner: an administrator can revoke sessions, and resetting your password ends yours. When a session ends while you are working, the Sign in card appears on its own, saying "Your session has expired — please sign in again." Nothing you were reading is lost — the map and the timetable behind it keep working.

Sign out asks first. The dialog is headed Sign out? and says signing out closes the operational tabs until you sign in again. Cancel and Sign out are the two buttons.

What signing in changes

• The two closed tabs open, as far as your role allows — see What your role lets you do.
• Your settings follow the account. A setting you had already chosen in this browser carries across to an account that has never chosen one for itself; a setting the account has already chosen wins over the browser's. Nothing you have set up is thrown away by signing in.
• The record of where you have been is swapped, not merged. The Recent menu and the offer to pick up where you left off are kept per person on this browser, so signing in shows you your trail rather than the trail of whoever used this workstation before you. See Finding your way back.

What it does not mean

Signed out is not locked out. With no account you still have the timetable, the map and every overlay. If a screen you expected is missing while signed out, check first whether it is one of the two protected ones before assuming something is wrong.

Signed in is not the same as allowed. Your role decides what opens. A signed-in viewer clicking Operations Analysis gets a message, not the tab — because signing in again would not help, and the app says so rather than showing you the card a second time.

The role beside your name is not a job title. It is what the app will let this account do, nothing more. Ask an administrator to change it if it is wrong.

Being signed in on this machine says nothing about any other. The session lives in this browser. Signing in here does not sign you in at the next workstation, and signing out here does not sign you out there.

The wait after too many attempts is not only about your account. The app counts failures two ways — against the username, and against the network connection the attempts came from — and applies whichever wait is longer. A control room whose workstations share one connection can therefore be told to wait because of somebody else's typing. It clears itself; nobody has to unlock anything.

This manual is not behind the sign-in. It is readable by anyone who can reach the app, signed in or not, which is exactly why nothing from the roster and no account name is ever written into it.