Adding a Mobile App to a Confex Society Meeting: What the Link Carries
Confex runs your society's abstracts, reviewing, and scheduling, and publishes a meeting app for each edition. This guide covers what a permanent attendee app can read straight from that meeting app — from one link — and what you still have to tell it.
If your annual meeting runs on Confex, you already have a public meeting app: the
meetingapp.cgi page your attendees browse. Everything below is about that
page. HEPCon reads the programme behind it, rather than asking you to export, clean, or
re-key anything — and this guide is honest about the four things the meeting app does
not know about your meeting.
What Confex Does — and Where It Stops
Confex is built for the scale of a large scholarly-society meeting: thousands of abstracts, dozens of parallel tracks, a review-to-schedule pipeline that holds up. The meeting app it publishes is scoped to one meeting. Next year's edition is a new app, with a new address, that members download and learn again — and the audience you built up over the years starts from zero each January.
That is the gap a permanent attendee app closes: one app the society keeps, with each edition as an event inside it. The condition is that the app must read Confex's programme faithfully, roles and rooms included, without adding a data-preparation job to your programme committee's calendar. The rest of this guide is what "faithfully" means.
How HEPCon Reads a Confex Meeting
1) The meeting-app link (all we need)
Every Confex meeting app has an address of the form
https://<host>/<society>/<meeting-code>/meetingapp.cgi.
Any page of it works — the front page, a session, a paper, a person — because the
meeting code sits in the path. Paste it on the try-free page
and we take it from there.
2) The public meeting API behind it
Next to the app, every Confex meeting publishes a sibling meetingapi.cgi
that serves the meeting's record collections as JSON, without a login. HEPCon reads five
of them, read-only:
| Collection | What it holds | If the meeting gates it |
|---|---|---|
| Session | Every session with its programme grouping, times, and type | Required |
| Paper | Every talk and poster with title, abstract, and times | Required |
| Person | One row per person per role instance | Required |
| Role | Who does what on each session and paper, with Confex's own role names and presenter order | Falls back to per-person flags — less precise, reported as a warning |
| SlotData | Room, floor, and capacity of every scheduled session and paper, plus the venue | Sessions import without rooms, reported as a warning |
Nothing is written back, no credentials are involved, and there is no API project on your side. The reads are plain requests for the meeting in the link, and nothing else.
3) If your meeting's API is closed
Some societies restrict the meeting API. The same records exist as downloadable JSON dumps in the Confex organizer tools (one file each for Session, Paper, Person, and Role). Send those files and the import runs identically — the only difference is that programme changes then reach us by a fresh file rather than by re-reading the link.
What Comes Across
The structure your programme committee built, mapped record by record.
| In Confex | In the app |
|---|---|
| Sessions and their programme grouping | Sessions, typed as plenary, poster, or parallel talks from the grouping and Confex's poster flags — so the timeline colours and filters work without configuration |
| Papers with abstracts | Contributions with full abstracts. Confex ships formulas as pre-rendered images; the LaTeX behind each is recovered and rendered natively, crisp and offline |
| People — one row per role instance | One profile per person, roles merged. A programme chair who also presents two papers is one person, not three |
| Roles — Organizer, Co-Organizer, Moderator, Panelist, Presenting Author, Author… | Each person listed under the heading Confex gives them, in Confex's presenter order, on every session and paper. Any term can be renamed per meeting from the organizer dashboard |
| Room assignments | Locations with floor and capacity, ready for venue maps. A paper with no slot of its own inherits its session's room |
| Withdrawn and incomplete records | Left out, and counted in the import report so you can see what was skipped |
What the Meeting App Does Not Know
Four things are missing from every Confex export. None of them blocks the import, but each needs a decision.
The time zone
Confex records carry wall-clock times with no zone. The slot records do carry an offset, but it is the offset at the time the row was written, so a January meeting can show a summer offset — trusting it would shift every session by an hour. HEPCon therefore asks you for the venue's time zone once and treats that as authoritative: times render correctly in the venue zone and in each attendee's own.
Email addresses
The export carries none, so people are identified by name. Two distinct people with an identical name would share a profile — rare, and visible in the preview. Anything that depends on matching a person to an app account by email does not happen automatically.
Session colours
Confex has no per-session colour scheme. The app colours the timeline by session type instead, and a custom scheme can be set from the organizer dashboard if your society uses one.
Gated collections
Roles and rooms are read from collections a meeting can restrict. When one is closed the import still completes — with roles derived from per-person flags, or with sessions unplaced — and the report says so, so you can decide whether to open the collection or send the file.
Common Issues to Watch For
A LaTeX document pasted into an abstract field
Formulas are handled; a whole document preamble pasted into an abstract is not, on purpose — a stripper that guesses would eat real prose elsewhere. The preview shows it, and the fix is at the source, in Confex.
Untimed records
A session or paper without a scheduled time cannot sit on a timeline. These are skipped and counted in the import report; give them a slot in Confex and the next re-sync picks them up.
Very large panels
A session with ten organizers, moderators, and panelists above eight talks would push the talks off the screen. Each role group shows its first three people with a "show all" control, so the programme stays visible and the full roster stays one tap away.
The scale is the point
The import has been exercised end to end on a society meeting's public programme with 549 sessions, 3,271 papers, 5,660 people, and 89 rooms — the size at which a per-meeting app's search is usually the first complaint. The whole programme is cached on the phone, and search reaches every abstract offline.
The Setup Process in Practice
- Paste the meeting-app link on the try-free page and fill in the venue time zone. A logo and colours can follow by email.
- We build a private preview from the public meeting API within 48 hours and send you the import report: what came across, what was skipped, and why.
- You review with your committee — roles, rooms, formulas, the programme tree — and rename any role term your society words differently.
- Go live. The event appears inside the HEPCon app members already have. Keep editing in Confex: HEPCon re-reads the meeting on a schedule and applies the difference. Content you add in HEPCon — sponsors, venue maps, committees, announcements, branding — is never touched by a re-sync.
Evaluation is free with your live programme; the go-live decision is due one week before the meeting. Programmes under 50 contributions are free outright.
Which Confex Meetings Are a Good Fit?
Good fit
- Society annual meetings with many parallel sessions, where finding a session is the recurring complaint
- Recurring meetings whose members should not reinstall an app every edition
- Programmes heavy in mathematics or notation, where rendering has to be right
- Meetings with rich role structures — organizers, moderators, panelists — that a flat speaker list flattens
Probably not needed
- A single-track one-day symposium whose programme fits on one page
- A meeting whose members are happy in the current per-meeting app and never search
Even then, under 50 contributions it costs nothing to see.
Related reading
- Confex conference app — solution overview
- Confex Meetings Now Import From the Meeting-App Link — what changed, in brief
- All integrations
- How to start
- How instant previews work — the self-serve path for the instant-tier systems
Ready to see your Confex meeting on mobile?
Paste the meeting-app link. Nothing to export, nothing re-keyed — a private preview with your real programme within 48 hours.
Try Free with My Confex Link Book a Demo