Introduction

A local portal is a HTML5/JavaScript portal which is located inside the STB boot image, and not on a HTTP server on some remote machine.

An STB which has a local portal is able to boot, launch and execute the local portal without having any network access. One common use for this is to check the availabilty of network resources, and present a localized troubleshooting dialog, or customer service phone number. In the case of Wi-Fi enabled STB's, a Wi-Fi scanner may be implemented. This gives you more flexibility in the look, feel and functionality of the Wi-Fi scanner compared to the default boot loader Wi-Fi Wizard.

Even though the local portal is available without requiring network access, any changes to the portal source code require you to rebuild, sign and deploy a new boot image to the STB. Due to this, although you could store your entire middleware portal as a local portal, it is usually better to implement a simple boot-up portal locally, which presents error screens if the network is unavailable, otherwise proceeds to load the main portal over the network.

The SDK contains an example which does just this, and the following pages explain how to add it to the example boot image, and how it works.