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- Run your PhixFlow installation. If necessary:
- Switch to
Insert excerpt _design_mode _design_mode nopanel true - Expand the Applications branch.
- Expand the Help Viewer.
tocDeveloping an application in PhixFlow is a simple process:
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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 introduces the process you can follow for any project:
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To illustrate the process, you will create a simple analysis model and build an application to view and update the its data.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.
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Remember that you can:
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- Add a "floating" form to add a description.
- Add the action to update stream
- Show the form in action - that is is always on top, and that save also closes the pop-up.
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Understand Your Data
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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.
- 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 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), and . The spreadsheet has the following tabs.
Businesses tab:
Contacts tab:
The spreadsheet is currently maintained by one person, but you data in the two tabs is connected by the the business name.
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
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.
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Remember that you can:
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:
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. |
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The first step is to create a PhixFlow application. Everything you create will belong to this application.
- In the repository, right-click on Application and select
.Insert excerpt _add _add nopanel true - PhixFlow opens a properties tab for the application. Enter the name:
tbc - Click
.Insert excerpt _save _save nopanel true - When prompted to load the application, say yes.
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Creation might create a menu
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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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Model your data
You now need to load the spreadsheet that contains the data into your application.
- Open your application.
- Right-click
and selectInsert excerpt _model _model nopanel true
. PhixFlow opens a properties tab for the model.Insert excerpt _add _add nopanel true - In Basic Settings > Name enter:
Businesses - In the toolbar for the tab, click
.Insert excerpt _model_display _model_display nopanel true - In the workspace on the left, PhixFlow opens an empty model.
- To load the Excel file, drag a
from the model toolbar into the model.Insert excerpt _file_collector _file_collector nopanel true - PhixFlow opens the properties for the file collector. Add a name:
Business-Fileand
the properties.Insert excerpt _save _save nopanel true - In the model, hover your mouse pointer over the file collector. PhixFlow displays a pop-up toolbar. Click
. Browse to the Excel file.Insert excerpt _upload_file _upload_file nopanel true - In the upload window, click the
button. This processInsert excerpt _upload_button _upload_button nopanel true - automatically configures the file collector properties to upload the file
- creates a stream ready to hold the data. Streams are like PhixFlow's internal spreadsheets.
Troubleshooting
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For file collectors, when you configure no properties, other than the name, when you upload the file PhixFlow automatically sets the other properties. If you make any changes to any field, even if you then delete the change, PhixFlow assumes you want to configure the properties yourself.
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Loading a file into PhixFlow like this sets up the properties. There are lots of options which let you load data.... |
Setting Stream Properties
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Have a look at the stream properties and Set
- Basic Settings → Period to Transactional
- Tick Audit Manual Changes
- Attributes → Description to Bigstring
the attribute properties.Insert excerpt _finish _finish nopanel true -
the stream properties and pin the stream properties to keep them open.Insert excerpt _save _save nopanel true
Script
If you look in the stream properties, you can see PhixFlow had named the file using the file collector name. It already has the list of attributes - the table columns - from the first tab in the spreadsheet.
Info title Key concept At this point the stream knows about the data, but does not contain any data. This is the time to check that stream properties and the data types and sizes are correct. You cannot make changes to the attributes once data is loaded.
- Have a look at the stream properties. The Basic Settings → Period is set to variable. In general PhixFlow assumes you are processing large datasets in batches. We are going to be making individual changes to single data records (transactions) . So that PhixFlow optimises processing for this type of data, In the Period drop-down list, select Transactional.
- In the attributes, there is one data type that we want to change. Currently the Description is set to be a string with a maximum of 500 characters. To remove this restriction, we can change it to a "big string" which can have 4000 characters.
- As we are going to have multiple people making changes to the data, it will be useful to be able to see who made changes. To set PhixFlow to track this for you, tick Audit Manual Changes.
- In the Attributes grid, double-click on description. PhixFlow opens a Description tab for the attribute. in Basic Settings → Type drop-down, select Bigstring. Click
to save and close the attribute description.Insert excerpt _finish _finish nopanel true
your changes. Notice that the orange background tells you that the properties have unsaved changes. When you save, the backgound colour returns to light green.Insert excerpt _save _save nopanel true - It will be useful to have the stream properties open later, so click the Pin icon.
Run Analysis
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You model should now look like this
Hover our mouse pointer over the BusinessData stream and select
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In the confirmation window, click Yes to confirm.
In the bottom left of the Screen, PhixFlow shows some confirmation messages. Close these.
We can now check that the data has loaded into the stream.
In the model, hover your mouse pointer over the stream and select
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You can now pull the data from the uploaded Excel file and into the stream. This is called "running analysis".
Hover your mouse pointer over the BusinessData stream
Run analsis
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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
- Run the Stream
Create a view of the data (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
Tick Maximised.
Name buisnesses
Opens a blank dashboard on left.
Drag stram from properites, and pick grid
Select UID to Description (not audit
Drop onto header bar
Dashboard shows the grid.
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You can show data as a table, but also as charts |
There are different ways to do this.
Split the dashboard horizontally and add a form
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Show all palletes
Application lego bricks - gui bits as palettes templates.
Drag purple form onto the dashboard pfApp Builder (inner) Business
Uses the template to add a form.
Note splitter is draggable to adjust the proportions and scroll bars added automatically.
What attributes do you want. In stream select attributes, select, shift-drag and drop. Adds attributes.
Description goes onto right
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.
Change the header to Business details
Make the header "Dynamic" to use a the data from the attribute
Initially the form does not change whith selected
Drag UID onto form.
Creates a backgound filter to use the UID to decide which is selected. See properties and say yeas
Add a sort order. If you update without a sort order, updated data
Without audit it overrides the entry in situ. Audit - marks old record as invalid and makes a new stream set. Without sort order - moves to the bottom. Sort by name, uid - use the dasboard.
LOcking and unlocking the layout
CRUD the data
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