Tab-Based Navigation

The Otesse dashboard uses a tab-based navigation system inspired by web browsers. Each piece of work — a zone detail page, an industry configuration, a customer record — opens in its own tab at the bottom of the screen. Tabs persist across page reloads and re-logins, preserving your exact working context.

How Tabs Work

When you click on a record — a zone, customer, industry, or any entity — the system opens it in a new tab at the bottom of the dashboard. The tab bar shows all open records with their display names. You can switch between tabs by clicking them, reorder tabs by dragging, and close tabs when you are done.

Each tab maintains its own independent state. When you switch away from a tab and come back, your scroll position, applied filters, pagination state, and any unsaved form data are exactly as you left them. This is fundamentally different from traditional page navigation where leaving a page means losing your context.

The Dashboard Tab

Every workspace starts with a pinned Dashboard tab. This tab cannot be closed or evicted — it is your home base. The Dashboard tab shows an overview of your system: key metrics, recent activity, and quick-access shortcuts. It is always the leftmost tab in the tab bar.

Opening Tabs

Tabs open in several ways. Clicking a record name in a list view opens that record in a new tab. Clicking "Open Full View" in a drawer preview opens the previewed entity in a new tab. Some system actions, like clicking another zone's boundary on the Coverage map, automatically open a new tab for that zone.

If you click a record that already has an open tab, the system switches to the existing tab rather than opening a duplicate. If the record should open on a specific sub-tab (like the Coverage tab of a zone), the system navigates to that sub-tab within the existing tab.

Tab Types

Each tab has a data type that determines what component renders inside it and what URL pattern it uses. Common tab types include the Dashboard (the always-present home tab), Zone Detail (opens when you click a zone record), Industry Detail (opens for industry records), Customer Detail (opens for customer records), and generic Record Detail (for other entity types).

The data type also defines default properties, such as whether the tab should auto-refresh its content and what the refresh interval should be.

Record detail tabs often have their own internal navigation. A Zone Detail tab, for example, has top tabs for Overview, Coverage, Labor, Industries, Pricing, and Scheduling. These top tabs are tracked as part of the tab's state and persist when you switch away and come back.

This creates a two-level tab system: bottom tabs for navigating between records, and top tabs for navigating within a record's detail view.

Tab Limits

Each workspace has a maximum number of tabs, determined by your plan tier. Free plans allow 10 tabs, Starter plans allow 15, Pro plans allow 20, and Enterprise plans allow 50. When you reach the tab limit and try to open a new tab, the system evicts the least recently used non-pinned tab to make room. Pinned tabs are never evicted.

Tab Bar Interactions

The tab bar supports several interaction patterns. Click a tab to switch to it. Right-click a tab for a context menu with options like close, close others, close all to the right, pin, and duplicate. Drag a tab to reorder it within the bar. Double-click a tab name to rename it. The close button (X) on each tab closes it and switches to the nearest neighbor.

Keyboard Shortcuts

For power users, the tab system supports keyboard navigation. Use Ctrl+Tab (or Cmd+Tab on Mac) to cycle through tabs in order. Use Ctrl+W to close the current tab. Use Ctrl+Shift+T to reopen the most recently closed tab from history.