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.
Add screenshot here
Introduction
PhixFlow is a flexible platform that can help you to manage your data. This Quick Start Guide guides you through the process of setting up data and building an application to view and update the data.
The quick start?? takes you through the steps to load the Excel spread sheet and to build a simple application to interact with the data. The Application will have a single screen, called a layout, that displays the data and lets you create, read, update or delete (CRUD ) data records. These are known as CRUD actions.
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.
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.
- Add buttons for actions
- Add a "floating" form to add a description.
- Add the action to update stream
- Show the form in action - that is is always on top, and that save also closes the pop-up.
- Linking forms together
- Add a comments stream to the model
- Add comment cards
- As layouts are not a fixed structure, but "flow" their order in the repository is important. To reorder an item, you don't drag it in the layout, but in the repository.
- Add actions to the card
- Show the audit attributes on the card
- Add comments on the card.
Planning
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 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.
- How does the data connect? These connections are the data relationships.
- 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?
The starting point for this quick start is that your business is using an Excel spreadsheet to manage a list of Business contacts. The data represents people, and looks like this:
The spreadsheet is currently maintained by one person, but 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
- comments, for example about recent conversations with the business contact.
This is an example of how PhixFlow can pull in the ad hoc files that people use and maintain (shadow IT), whilst making it easy for multiple people to maintain.
Create an Application
Create your application: It is created with default options
Create an Analysis Model
- Data and streams
Import data
Import the Spreadsheet
Create a stream
Set Period to: Transactional.
Set Audit Manual Changes to: Ticked
Set Description to: Big String
Run the Stream
New Stream
Create a Comments Stream
Set Period to: Transactional.
Set Audit Manual Changes to: Ticked
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
Add a 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
Add a form to a tab
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.
Link Tab to data
From the Businesses Grid, drag the UID down onto the Business Detail form.
This creates a link, so the selected Business Is displayed.
Second Tab is for Contact Details
To be completed once we import the contact details.
Add a form for comments
...
Right click on the Comments column and create a form.
Set the form to Stream Comments created in 2d
From the Palette Theme 1 Template drag the item: Comment Header, onto the new form.
From the Palette App Builder Labelled drag the item: Card Container, onto the new form.
From the Palette Theme 1 Template drag the item: Comment Card, onto the small white card in the CardContainer.
Hold shift while doing this so the items is embedded.
Add a dashboard
Create a Dashboard, this will be used to edit our comments.
Create a new form.
From the Palette Theme 1 Template drag the item: Form Floating, onto the new form.
From the Repository delete:
Column Line Break
Column 2
Drag the following attributes from the Comments Stream onto content container:
UID
Hide
BusinessUID
Hide
Comment
Give the header a sensible name and delete the dynamic text
New Comment
From the repository drag the new Comment Dashboard onto the + on the Comments header.
Mapping Identifier
Drag the UID from the Businesses Grid created in 2b onto the + on the Comments header.
Set this up to map to BusinessUID
Go into the action by right clicking the button and select Action Edit*
Create a Context variable for UID set this to _NULL
Add Action
Open the Comments Stream
Create a new action, this is the same as the setup for the aforementioned but UID is set to Busineses.UID
Title
text
Title
text