Xera Lab: a dental case management platform
A customer portal and an admin dashboard on one Node.js API, built and delivered to the client as a private production system. The kind of platform that replaces a shared folder and a spreadsheet.
Context
A dental lab sits between clinics and technicians. A case arrives from a dentist with photographs, measurements and a deadline; it moves through several stages inside the lab; and the dentist wants to know where it is without phoning.
Before a system exists, that coordination lives in email attachments, a shared drive and someone's memory.
The problem
- Cases and their files had no single home, so the current version of a file was whatever was most recently emailed.
- Clinics had no way to check status themselves, so every update was an interruption.
- Staff and customers needed to see very different things, which meant access rules, not just screens.
What we built
One platform with two faces on a shared Node.js API: a portal where the customer submits and tracks their own cases, and an admin dashboard where the lab moves cases through their stages.
PostgreSQL holds the case records, because this is relational data with real integrity requirements — a case belongs to a customer, has stages, and must not be visible to the wrong account. Access is enforced by role with JWT rather than by hiding buttons in the interface.
Case files are uploaded to AWS S3, so photographs and scans do not live in the database or on a single machine. The whole system deploys with Docker Compose behind Nginx.
- Customer portal for case submission and status tracking
- Admin dashboard for the lab's internal workflow
- Node.js and PostgreSQL API with JWT role-based access
- AWS S3 file storage for case photographs and scans
- Docker Compose and Nginx deployment
Where it stands
Xera Lab runs as a private production system for its client. There is no public URL to show, which is why this page describes the architecture rather than the interface.
Attribution: Architected and built by Abdullah Mohamed, founder of Desert Launch.
Replacing a spreadsheet with a system?
Portals, dashboards, roles and file handling — the parts that make an internal system trustworthy.