Define Your Data

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 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, for example, to add descriptions about the business.

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.

Step 1 Connect PhixFlow to the data source

In your application, create model and set Basic Settings > Name enter: Businesses
To open the model in the workspace, click the toolbar button Display.
To load the Excel file, drag a File Collector from the model toolbar into the model and set Basic Settings > Name: Business-File, then Save the properties.
In the model, hover your mouse pointer over the file collector. PhixFlow displays a pop-up toolbar. Click Upload File . Browse to the Excel file.
In the upload window, click the button. Your model should now look like this.

Explore the possibilities

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.

Step 2 Set the data properties

In the stream properties on the right, set:

Basic Settings → Period to Transactional
Tick Audit Manual Changes
Save
Click on the pin to keep the stream properties
open. You will need it later

Explore the possibilities

Look in the Attributes section

You can see that PhixFlow has identified all the properties of the data columns (attributes) such as the type and length. If you want to make any changes to these ...

Step 3 Import the data

Script / Details

You now need to load the spreadsheet that contains the data into your application.

Open your application.
Right-click Models and select Add. PhixFlow opens a properties tab for the model.
In Basic Settings > Name enter: Businesses
In the toolbar for the tab, click Display.
In the workspace on the left, PhixFlow opens an empty model.
To load the Excel file, drag a File Collector from the model toolbar into the model.
PhixFlow opens the properties for the file collector. Add a name: Business-File and Save the properties.
In the model, hover your mouse pointer over the file collector. PhixFlow displays a pop-up toolbar. Click Upload File . Browse to the Excel file.
In the upload window, click the button. This process
- 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.

Advanced 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.