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 to build an application:
- Set up a PhixFlow application
- Define your data
- Load the data into PhixFlow
- Create a screen to maintain your data
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
Set up 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:
Unique-name
- Click Save.
- When prompted to load the application, say yes.
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Creation might create a menu
Placeholder video
Define Your Data
This needs to be shorter with a link to this:
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.
Connect to Your Data Source
To load the data.
- 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.
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.
Set up Data Properties
Stream Properties
Have a look at the stream properties and set:
- Basic Settings → Period to Transactional
- Tick Audit Manual Changes
- 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.
- Save your changes. Notice that the orange background tells you that the properties have unsaved changes. When you save, the background colour returns to light green.
- It will be useful to have the stream properties open later, so click the Pin icon.
Data Attributes
Modify any data attributes before loading the data into the stream. In the Attributes section, you can double-click on any attribute to open its properties and edit them. Change:
UID
to have the nameBusinessUID
Name:
- to
BusinessName
- Size to
100
- to
Description
to have the type Bigstring- Add a new attribute and set:
- Name to
Comment
_NULL
- Type to
Bigstring
- Name to
You attribute list should now look like this.
When you save the stream, PhixFlow automatically adds some additional attributes. Because you set the stream to:
- transactional, PhixFlow has added
UID
- Audit Manual Changes, PhixFlow has added 4 attributes with names starting with
Update*
If we want to make any changes to the attributes, we need to do it before we load the data into the stream. In the Attributes section, you can double-click on any attribute to open its properties and edit them.
- First lets change UID. Double-click the UID line in the Attributes table. PhixFlow opens its properties. In Basic Settings → Name, change its name to
BusinessUID
. Click OK to save and close the properties. - We will make some more changes.
- Set
Name:
- to be called
BusinessName
- Size to
100
OK
- to be called
- Set
Description
to have the type Bigstring and OK - In the Attributes section toolbar, click Add and set:
- Name to
Comment
- Type to
Bigstring
OK
- Name to
Load your Data
- Hover over the BusinessData stream and select Run Analysis, then click Yes to confirm.
- Close the confirmation messages.
- To check that the data has loaded into the stream, hover your mouse pointer over the stream and select Stream Views then select Default View. PhixFlow displays the data it has loaded into the stream.
Script
You can now load the data into the stream.
- In the model, 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 can see that the same data from the Excel spreadsheet is now loaded in the stream, with the additional columns we added to the Attributes.
Create a Screen to Maintain Your Data
Add a Dashboard
To view the data, create a dashboard.
- In the repository, Add a dashboard.
- Set:
- Name to
Manage Contacts
and Save - Tick Open Maximised
- Name to
- Save
Add a Dashboard
You can now create a dashboard that uses displays data from the stream. We do this using a Dashboard. We want to have a view of the whole grid, and a form showing details of one data record.
- In the repository, find the Dashboards branch and right-click then select Add.
- PhixFlow opens an empty dashboard window and a properties tab for the dashboard.
- In the dashboard properties, set
- the name to
Manage Contacts
and SaveTick Open Maximised
- the name to
- Save the properties
Show the data
- Add a horizontal bar.
- From the Business File stream properties tab, drag the stream icon onto the top half of the dashboard.
- Select the "Table" icon and the attributes you want to display.
- Drag the attributes into the dashboard.
- Close the list of attributes.
Show the data
You want the top half of the dashboard to show the data and for the bottom half to have a form that displays details of the selected record.
- To split the dashboard horizontally, right-click on the dashboard and add a horizontal bar.
- It is very easy to show the stream data in the dashboard. Open the Business File stream properties tab. You can drag the stream icon from the tab onto the top half of the dashboard.
- PhixFlow needs to know how you want to show the data. Select the "Table" icon.
- PhixFlow needs to know which attributes you want to show. In this case we will only include some of them in the dashboard. We do not need the 4 Update* attributes. Click the box in the table header to select all the attributes then clear the ticks after "Description".
- Now drag the selected attributes into grey bar in the dashboard.
- Click X on the top right to close the attributes list.
Add 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
Add a form.
In the dashboard, right-click on the empty bottom half. and select Create New Form
Enter the name for the form and click > OK
PhixFlow adds a form background using the styles that have been set as defaults for this application.
You will now add the form fields using palettes - which are predefined layouts.
To access the pallets, go to the bottom right of the PhixFlow window and click the Show Palettes icon.
PhixFlow opens a tab. Each section has a set of pre-designed components Expand the section pf AppBuilder (Theme 1).
Click on Form Title and drag it into the form. This component is going to create an area on your form. Enter the name "Title" This is the name of the component in the repository. This adds the header area to the form. It has two parts, a Fixed section, which you can overtype , and a dynamic, which we will link to the data.
Now drag in the Form Body and name Business Body.
Now PhixFlow had added more stuff, with two parts, including some buttons "New" and "Insert". We are going to use the left to show the selected record, and the right to show its description or a map - tbc
Now go back to your stream tab - which should be pinned. If the tab is not there, you can right-click on the top of the dashboard and select Show the Stream Configuration
In the list, click to select attributes you want to show on the form, In this case UID through to Active. Shift-Drag the selected list onto the left of the form body.
If you just drag and drop then PhixFlow does not know which area you want the data to be added to.
Notice that you can drag the horizontal splitter up and down to adjust the size of the the top and bottom panels of the dashboard. PhixFlow adds scroll bars if they are needed.
Now Shift Drag Description into the right side of the form body. PhixFlow automatically adds an editing toolbar.
You can change things
All the "bits" you have added to the dashboard are stored in the repository, in a branch called Layouts.
If you expand the Business Editor Form > Business Body > Form Content Container > Form Column Container 1x2, you can see how different parts of the dashboard are repository items that are nested. These items and their container-contained relationships have been created automatically when you drag in the components from the palette.
From the palette, the form body is fixed at a 50-50 split. Double-click on Column 1 to open its properties.
Expand the Style Settings section
untick AutoSize
Now PhixFlow sets the size of area showing the fields based on their field width, leaving more space for the description.
Add Update actions
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
Connecting the data in the grid at the top to the form at the bottom of the dashboard.
At the moment, the data at the top of screen is in a random order.
- we want to sort the data
The bottom screen only shows the first record
we want the form to show the record we have selected
In the grid at the top, hover to show the filter icon. Drag it onto the blue background of the form in the bottom and confirm.
PhixFlow opens a properties tab with Filter Details that shows how the filter works.
You can rename it to something more meaningful, such as By_UID.
Where does this filter get stored in the repository????
We want to do the header