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Before you start any PhixFlow project, it is important to take time to understand your data and what you need to do with it. 

For this example, a sales team is using an Excel spreadsheet to manage a list of Business contacts. The data represents business customers (location, turnover) and people (names and addresses). The spreadsheet has the following tabs.

Businesses tab:

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Contacts tab:

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The data in the two tabs is connected by the the business name.

customer businesses and associated contacts. 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 for example, to add descriptions about the business.

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Placeholder Video

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How To

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The first step is to create a PhixFlow application. Everything you create will belong to this application.

<video>

  1. In the repository, right-click on Application and select 
    Insert excerpt
    _add
    _add
    nopaneltrue
    . 
  2. PhixFlow opens a properties tab for the application. Enter the name: Unique-name
  3. Click 
    Insert excerpt
    _save
    _save
    nopaneltrue
    .
  4. When prompted to load the application, say yes.


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titleExplore the possibilities

Scroll down the properties tab. 

If you scroll down to the Grid section, you can see that there is a  Grid Header Style. This means that whenever PhixFlow displays data  in a grid (table), the table header will always have the same colour, font size and style. 

You can see there are lots of options where you can set data format and style defaults for the application. If none are set here, then PhixFlow uses defaults that are set for the system. This means that, all your applications have a consistent base line for the data and its styles, or you can apply defaults per-application, if you want them to look different. 






...


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titleAdvanced or move?

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 does the data connect? These connections are the data relationships.  
  • 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.
  • 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?

Remember that you can:

  • PhixFlow can connect to data stored in external databases (list or link?) or data files in a range of formats (list or link?)
  • PhixFlow analysis models are a powerful tool that you can use on any data project. Analysis models can help you to improve your data integrity, by 
    • identifying missing data, duplication and variation 
    • reconciling data in different files or systems.
  • The Introduction to Modelling Course shows how to do this
  • set up your own styles and palettes to create completely customised layouts. The Building Applications Course goes through this process.

You can represent your data and requirements in an Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD); see Wikipedia. It can help you to understand the data entities, their attributes and relationships. An ERD shows you the data architecture. As well as clarifying the data you already have and what you need to calculate, an ERD can help you identify:

  • static data: once added is unlikely to need updating. For example, the list of possible salutations:
    • Mr, Ms, Dr, Sir, Lord
  • control data, that PhixFlow uses for  screen input, for example data that is displayed in a drop-down list.
  • CRUD data, that PhixFlow will be able to create, read, update and delete.

Within PhixFLow it is a good idea to be consistent, at a minimum within an application. You can use prefixes to distinguish CRUD or control data from static data. During the planning phase you can set up a naming policy.

Expand
titleMove out

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 does the data connect? These connections are the data relationships.  
  • 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.
    • 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?




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