This page guides you through the Sandbox Demo which is installed as an Application in the repository. The Quick Start takes about 30 minutes to complete. To access the demo, and follow these instructions from within PhixFlow:

Run your PhixFlow installation. If necessary:
Switch to Design Mode
Expand the Applications branch.
Expand the Help Viewer.

Developing an application in PhixFlow is a simple process:

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Introduction

PhixFlow is a flexible platform that can help you to manage your data. This Quick Start Guide introduces the process you can follow for any project:

To illustrate the process, you will create a simple analysis model and build an application to view and update its data.

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

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.
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?

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). The spreadsheet has the following tabs.

Businesses tab:

Contacts tab:

The 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.

Explore the possibilities

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.

Create an Application

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 Add.
PhixFlow opens a properties tab for the application. Enter the name: tbc
Click Save.
When prompted to load the application, say yes.

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Creation might create a menu

Explore the possibilities

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.

Model your data

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.

Troubleshooting

Palette is blank

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.

Explore the possibilities

Loading a file into PhixFlow like this sets up the properties. There are lots of options which let you load data....

Setting Stream Properties

Have a look at the stream properties and Set

Basic Settings → Period to Transactional
Tick Audit Manual Changes
Attributes → Description to Bigstring OK the attribute properties.
Save the stream properties and pin the stream properties to keep them open.

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.
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 OK to save and close the attribute description.
Save 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.
It will be useful to have the stream properties open later, so click the Pin icon.

Run Analysis

You model should now look like this

Hover our mouse pointer over the BusinessData stream and select Run Analysis

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 Stream Views then select Default View. THis simply shows the data using a standard table view. You should see ...

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

Script

Add attributes

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)

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.

Explore the possibilities

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

Set up CRUD Actions on a Form

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

PhixFlow Quick Start Guide

Introduction

Understand Your Data

Create an Application

Model your data

Setting Stream Properties

Run Analysis

Add attributes

Create a view of the data (dashboard)

Set up CRUD Actions on a Form

Add More Actions