App Designer Overview
Automate repetitive and time-consuming work by quickly building user interfaces that integrate tasks and data.
What are apps?
Simply put, apps are the things that you build inside App Designer to drive efficiency across your business. Maybe you work for a bank and need to streamline your mortgage request process. Maybe you work for a flooring company and need to simplify your job quote process.
In the context of App Designer, apps are composed of user interfaces (UIs), which run on the client, and actions, which run on the server. Think of apps as front-end UIs driven by back-end business logic.
Apps are usually based on templates or starter apps that are created by a more technical user, like a provider. Templates are composed of toolkits, which are libraries of building blocks (or assets) that can be used to create applications.
What are templates?
A template is a predefined starting point that you can use to create an app. A template can represent a common-use case pattern, such as a document renewal template, or workflow dashboard template. When a technical user creates a template, it can contain artifacts, such as apps, actions, views, and business objects. When you create an app based on a template, all of these artifacts in the template are copied into your app. Also, because a template references toolkits, these references are included in your App.
What are toolkits?
- Views: Reusable sets of user interface widgets, such as text fields, date time pickers, and buttons, that users can use to interact with a business object or service. Views can comprise one or more sets of other views, data bindings, layout instructions, and behaviors.
- Actions: Apps use actions to launch services, which contain business logic. You can configure an action for a view. For example, a user can click a button to launch a workflow service that opens a mortgage application.
- Business objects: Structured data types that represent solution entities as a collection of properties.
App Designer
Toolkits, templates, and apps can be built within App Designer. And thanks to the low-code app building experience inside App Designer, automating business tasks has never been easier.
For users familiar with building process applications with Process Designer from Business Automation Workflow, you will be comfortable building apps with App Designer, since many of the same concepts are the same between both designers. For more information about building applications in Business Automation Workflow, see Creating process applications.
- Basic: A simplified app design experience. The left navigation pane and other properties views are hidden.
- Advanced: A more robust app design experience for technical users. Access the left navigation pane and more properties.
How to build a simple app
- Base your app on a starting app or template that is provided to you.
- Construct your pages. Create a page and add the building blocks (views) that you want on the page. For example, add a button view or a text input view. Associate data with the view, if needed. Configure properties for the views, such as color.
- Configure next steps to move between pages. For example, add a next step for a button that a user clicks to move to another page.
- Test your app.
- Take a snapshot of your app.
- Publish your app.
- If your provider updates the template, update your app.