You now need to understand your data. For this quick start guide, your data is in this BusinessData.xls file, which you need to download to your computer.
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Summary of Steps
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Before you start building any PhixFlow |
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application, it is important to |
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understand your data and what you need to do with it. |
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For large projects this means detailed analysis using an Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD). For this example, a sales team is using an Excel spreadsheet to manage a list of customer businesses and associated contacts. You want to make it |
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easy for the team to access and maintain the data. You also want to add some simple CRM functions, for example, to add descriptions about the business. |
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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.
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PhixFlow has many options that you can use to define the data, its properties and relationships. But if you already have data available, you can quickly and easily load it into PhixFlow. The following video guides you through this process. |
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Create an analysis model- In the repository, right-click
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- Analysis Model and click to create a new model.
- Set Basic Settings > Name to
Businesses and click
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- new empty model on the left.
Load the Excel file- Drag a
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from the model toolbar into the analysis model. - Set Basic Settings > Name:
BusinessDataXY, and click | Insert excerpt |
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. - In the model, hover your mouse pointer over the file collector. PhixFlow displays a popup toolbar. Click
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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.
- 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:
- 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.
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- xlsx.
In the upload window, click the | Insert excerpt |
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button. PhixFlow creates a new stream and opens its properties. | Expand |
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| title | Explore the possibilities |
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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.
When you upload an Excel file, PhixFlow automatically sets many of the file collector and stream properties. There are many options that you can use to load different types of data from file. To connect PhixFlow to databases you can use a| Insert excerpt |
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Your model now looks like this (with your initials after the names).  Image Added
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| title | Set some data properties |
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In the stream properties on the right, set: Basic Settings → Period to Transactional
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| By default, a stream is optimised for processing large volumes of data. You are aiming to create a form for users to update individual data records (transactions). Setting this property to Transactional tells PhixFlow how you intend to manage the data. |
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| This data will be updated manually by individuals. By ticking this box, PhixFlow will add a set of attributes to automatically record audit information about changes. |
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- Click and then click on the to keep the stream properties open.
In the Attributes section, double-click Description and change its Type to Bigstring then click | Insert excerpt |
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| When you create a form for the data, PhixFlow recognises that data with the type Bigstring needs the field edit tools. |
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| Look in the Attributes section. When you connect PhixFlow to the Excel spreadsheet, it automatically identifies the properties of the data columns (attributes) such as their type (string, numerical) and length. This also happens when you connect PhixFlow to data stored in databases. |
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- In the model on the left, hover over the BusinessData stream and select
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, then click Yes to confirm. - To check that the data has loaded into the stream, hover your mouse pointer over the stream and select
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then select | Insert excerpt |
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. PhixFlow displays the data it has loaded into the stream. - In the model toolbar, click .
- Close any remaining confirmation messages (the green boxes in the bottom left).
You have now imported the spreadsheet data into PhixFlow.  Image Added
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You are now ready for step 3, create a user screen, which will display this data to your application users.