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Overview

The Specification Tool is a technical tool for developers. It provides a dashboard application that can be used for testing touchatag application Specification documents before creating a shareable application with the Configurator API.

The Specification Tool is intended for software developers and end users with very strong technically capabilities.

Required Knowledge

Before attempting to create and use your own custom Specifications, you must be familiar with the concepts in the following developer documentation pages:

• ACS Block System
• Specification API

Requesting Access

To use the Specification Tool, your touchatag user account must be provisioned with developer permissions.

This is currently a manual process. You must request access by emailing your username to Touchatag Developer Network at developer@touchatag.com with "Developer Access Request" as the subject. (Provisioning usually takes less than 24 hours.)

Benefits & Limitations

Benefits

You can rapidly test your Specification documents. The Specification Tool provides you a way way to do rapid, iterative testing of touchatag Application ideas by providing an interface through which you can directly submit Specification documents. This allows you to defer the creation of a custom user interface (Configurator Applet) for your Application, as well as the use of the Configurator API in order to submit your Specification, until you know that your the Specification for your application works correctly.

Although it was designed for testing Applications, any valid Specifications that you submit through it are completely functional touchatag Applications, and can be associated to any number of tags.

Limitations

You cannot share Applications created with the Specification Tool. The configuration interface for any Application created through the Specification Tool is a single multi-line text editor containing the specification's raw XML. It is not user-friendly. Therefore, you cannot share such an application out to the touchatag user community.

To create a shareable Application based on a Specification that you have validated through the Specification Tool, you need to create a Configurator Applet that submits your Specification through the Configurator API.

In the future, Touchatag Developer Network may also provide a facility for developers to share their Specification XML files with each other.

Implementation

Implementation Steps

1. Enter a name and description for your Application configuration.
2. Paste the XML for your Specification in the Specification field.
   (That's right, paste it. This interface is not intended to be used as a text editor.)
3. Click use this app to complete Step 1 of the configurator.

Troubleshooting your Specification

For help at troubleshooting your Specification Documents, see Troubleshooting on "Creating Specification Documents."

Your Suggestions

Because this is a new tool, please help us to build our list of troubleshooting tips by leaving a comment below.