User Guide

User guide

Auton8 is a platform rather than a single application. You define the data your organisation works with, model the processes that move it, and give people the screens to do the work — mostly through configuration rather than code.

This guide is organised the way the product is: by the thing you are working on.

Guide	Covers
Records	Record types, fields, records, relationships, comments, watching
Workflows	Modelling BPMN, deploying, running, and tracing processes
Documents-and-Notes	Collaborative documents, DOCX, notes and pages
Queries-and-Dashboards	AQL, saved queries, sharing, dashboard widgets
Data-Stores-and-Pipelines	Files and SQL stores, connectors, datasets, pipelines
The-Assistant	The in-app agent, its tools, and what it can and cannot do
Administration	Users, roles, permissions, menus, plugins, appearance, health

The shape of the product

Five ideas carry most of it.

Records are your data. A record type is a schema you define at runtime — fields, types, options. Records are instances of it. Nothing is compiled in; adding a field is configuration, not a deploy.

Workflows are your processes. Model BPMN in the browser, deploy to the engine, and watch runs execute. Service tasks call back into Auton8, so a process can act on records.

Content is your prose. Documents and Notes are real-time collaborative editors. Documents additionally do DOCX import/export, tracked changes, and bindings that pull live record data into the text.

Queries are your questions. AQL is a small query language over the platform's own entities — records, workflow executions, notes, datasets. Save a query, chart it, or put it on a dashboard.

Everything is permissioned. Authorization is not a bolt-on: every entity kind has actions, grants can be scoped to specific instances by a selector grammar, and the UI hides what you cannot use rather than letting you click into a 403.

Two conventions worth knowing early

The navigation is configuration. The left/top menus and most pages are rows in the database, not hardcoded routes. An administrator can add, hide, reorder and re-point them under Site Configuration → Pages / Menus. If a page you expect is missing, it may simply not be on a menu.

Affordances follow permissions. If you cannot see a button, the usual reason is that you lack the grant for it. The Permission Checker under Site Configuration → Security answers "why can this person do that?" directly, which is faster than guessing.

Getting in

There is no self-registration. The first administrator is created from configuration at first start (see Installation); everyone else is created by an administrator under Manage Users, and given access through roles, groups, or direct grants.