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Introduction

PhixFlow is a flexible platform that can help you to manage your data. This Quick Start Guide guides you through the process of setting up data and building an application to view and update the data.The starting point for this quick start?? is that your business is using an Excel spreadsheet to manage a list of Business contacts. You want to make this data accessible and maintainable by more than one person, and add some simple CRM functions:

This is an example of how PhixFlow can pull in the  ad hoc files that people use and maintain (shadow IT), whilst making it easy for multiple people to maintain.

The quick start?? takes you through the steps to load the Excel spread sheet and to build a simple application to interact with the data. The Application will have a single screen, called a layout, that displays the data and lets you create, read, update or delete (CRUD ) data records. These are known as CRUD actions.

PhixFlow has a lot of different options and settings. So that you can work through the process, some things are already set up for you:

• the Excel spreadsheet which you can download from here
• styles, set as system/application defaults, so that PhixFlow knows how to format data tables - which we call grids
• a palette of application components that you can drag onto the layout.
• styles that control the colours and appearance of the screen.

• CRM - an application 
• Revenue assurance - pulling in external data and doing some calculations, with views
• billing - uses data to generate documents to send to customers
• reconciliation
• data validation and integrity 
  
  • are company names consistent
  • do you want to flag up "old" dates or missing details?
  • check for duplicates

1. Add buttons for actions
   1. Add a "floating" form to add a description.
   2. Add the action to update stream
   3. Show the form in action - that is is always on top, and that save also closes the pop-up. 
2. Linking forms together
   1. Add a comments stream to the model
   2. Add comment cards
   3. As layouts are not a fixed structure, but "flow" their order in the repository is important. To reorder an item, you don't drag it in the layout, but in the repository.
   4. Add actions to the card
   5. Show the audit attributes on the card
   6. Add comments on the card.

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Planning 

Before you start any PhixFlow project, it is important to take time to understand your data.

• What is your data? Do you need to represent people, places, products, money, time? These are the data entities.
• How will you represent the data in PhixFlow? This depends on the attributes the data has.
• Is the data "clean" or do you need to tidy it up?
• What data is missing?  PhixFlow can combine existing data from different sources and use it to calculate additional data.
• How does the data connect? These connections are the data relationships.  
• What volume of data do you need to handle? For very large data volumes, you will be able to use modelling strategies to process data efficiently. 
• What do you need to do with the data? What is the business problem you want to solve? 

The starting point for this quick start is that your business is using an Excel spreadsheet to manage a list of Business contacts. The data represents people, and looks like this:

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The spreadsheet is currently maintained by one person, but you want to make it accessible and maintainable by more than one person. You also want to add some simple CRM functions, so that you can add:

• descriptions about the business
• comments, for example about recent conversations with the business contact.

This is an example of how PhixFlow can pull in the  ad hoc files that people use and maintain (shadow IT), whilst making it easy for multiple people to maintain.

Create your application: It is created with default options

Create an Analysis Model  

1. Data and streams

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title Explore the possibilities
Think about data first - ERD scroll down the properties - there are lots of options that you can set for your application

Import data 

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Import the Spreadsheet

Create a stream

Set Period to: Transactional.

Set Audit Manual Changes to: Ticked

Set Description to: Big String

Run the Stream

New Stream  

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Create a Comments Stream

Set Period to: Transactional.

Set Audit Manual Changes to: Ticked

Add attributes 

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Add the following attrinbutes:

BusinessUID as an Integer

BusinessName as a String of Size 100

Comment as a Big String

1. Run the Stream

Add a Dashboard 

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Create a new Dashboard to manage our data

Add the Businesses as a Grid to the dashboard

Split dashboard vertically

This is a place holder for the Comments

Split left area horizontally

Add a form to a tab 

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First Tab is for Business Details

Right click and create a new form

From the Theme 1 Template drag a “Form Inner” onto the display area

Drag the attributes from the Business Stream onto the left column

Drag Description onto the right side.

Link Tab to data 

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From the Businesses Grid, drag the UID down onto the Business Detail form.

This creates a link, so the selected Business Is displayed.

Second Tab is for Contact Details

To be completed once we import the contact details.

Add a form for comments 

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Right click on the Comments column and create a form.

Set the form to Stream Comments created in 2d

From the Palette Theme 1 Template drag the item: Comment Header, onto the new form.

From the Palette App Builder Labelled drag the item: Card Container, onto the new form.

From the Palette Theme 1 Template drag the item: Comment Card, onto the small white card in the CardContainer.

Hold shift while doing this so the items is embedded.

Add a dashboard

Create a Dashboard, this will be used to edit our comments.

Create a new form.

From the Palette Theme 1 Template drag the item: Form Floating, onto the new form.

From the Repository delete:

Column Line Break

Column 2

Drag the following attributes from the Comments Stream onto content container:

UID

Hide

BusinessUID

Hide

Comment

Give the header a sensible name and delete the dynamic text

New Comment 

From the repository drag the new Comment Dashboard onto the + on the Comments header.

Mapping Identifier 

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Drag the UID from the Businesses Grid created in 2b onto the + on the Comments header.

Set this up to map to BusinessUID

Go into the action by right clicking the button and select Action Edit*

Create a Context variable for UID set this to _NULL

Add Action 

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Open the Comments Stream

Create a new action, this is the same as the setup for the aforementioned but UID is set to Busineses.UID

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