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- Run your PhixFlow installation. If necessary:
- Switch to
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- Expand the Help Viewer.
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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 an application to view and update the 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 buttons for actions
- 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.
- Linking forms together
- Add a comments stream to the model
- Add comment cards
- 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.
- Add actions to the card
- Show the audit attributes on the card
- Add comments on the card.
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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 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 business customers (location, turnover) and people , and looks like this:(names and addresses), and has the following tabs.
Businesses tab:
Contacts tab:
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.
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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
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tbc
- Click
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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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You now need to load the spreadsheet that contains the data into your application.
- Open your application
- Right-click
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Import data
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
- 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
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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
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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
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BusinessUID
Hide
Comment
Give the header a sensible name and delete the dynamic text
New Comment
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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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