This topic is for application designers who need to define data structures, including streams, attributes, properties and relationships.
To configure your application to display data to users, you need to:
PhixFlow Entity-Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) define the logical structure of the data
and the relationships between streams; see Understanding ERDs and Views and Creating an ERD. You can:- either define an ERD before adding any data to PhixFlow
- or you can load data from external sources first. You can then drag streams into the ERD and simply add the relationships. This method is recommended as it ensures the data types will be correct.
- add data components, such as grids and charts
- connect a parent component to a data view, so that it's child fields can display data from the same source.
in your application. "Entities" represent the things in the world that you want to represent as data. Defining the data for your application is considered the first step in your design.
The following example shows an ERD for a school. The school has entities: departments, teachers, students, classrooms and so on. All these entities are represented as tables and the lines connecting them show their relationships to one another. We can see from this a School Department has many Class Rooms and Teachers. This is covered in more detail in Understanding ERDs and Views.
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Once the data is connected, you need to configure parts of the screen, such as buttons, with actionflows. This enables users to make changes to data; see OLD Actionflows and Action Configuration.
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ERD Page Layout
Here is a simplified view of the ERD editor.
- The Toolbar provides ERD specific options, such as displaying the available table that can be added to your ERD and options for creating new table.
- The Repository browser, can list all of the available tables in your application and any associated packages. Select Tables from the toolbar to display this area.
- The Canvas area where the ERD will be configured. Tables can be added by:
- Dragging Table from the create menu of the toolbar onto the canvas.
- Clicking Tables from the list menu of the toolbar and dragging a table from the repository onto the canvas.
- Excel documents can be dragged directly onto the canvas and will be imported automatically.
- The Tables and Relationships, are displayed on the canvas. A Table Shows all of the attributes it contains within it and the data type. A relationship between two tables is displayed as a line connecting the primary key of one table to a foreign key of a second table. This is discussed in more detail in Relationships.
Already have data?
If you already have data that you wish to import into PhixFlow, such as a database of customers, you will need to use an Analysis model.
Analysis Models will allow you to configure connectors to access your existing data sources and store the data as tables in PhixFlow's own database. You can also set up more bulk processes to manipulate large volumes of data before it is presented to your users; see Analysis Model.
What Next?
Understanding ERDs and Views covers ERDs in more depth to help you design your own ERDs and views of the data.
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May need more details on options for loading data, or a separate concept page.
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