FranciscoAnzoat
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Journey of a New Quickbase Builder: App Management
Becoming Builder certified and a successful application builder comes with different lessons learned along the way. I’ve discussed several key topics that will help you in achieving the goal of becoming Quickbase Builder Certified. These topics are: App planning Relationships Complex relationships User and permissions The last critical piece into becoming builder certified is managing your application. How to manage your application(s) You’ve just created this awesome application and it is ready to go live. Your job is done, right? Wrong! Now is the time to manage your application and continually set it up for success. My “aha” moment struck me in a sense of comparing app management to coaching a soccer team. I won’t win a championship by simply gathering players and making a team. I need to game plan to put these players in positions that showcase their strengths, work on team/individual weaknesses, and adapt to changes in order to win. Same idea with your application - it needs to be managed and set up for success. There are two places where you can go to configure and manage your application: App Properties and App Management. It is critical to click into both management settings and understand what these can do for you and your application. Both pages can be found by clicking into the settings gear at the top left of the screen under the home tab. (It will then display the settings page (shown below) App Properties - This section is broken down into five headings: Name & Description Formatting App Date and Time Advanced Settings Cross-application relationships App Management - This section is broken down into four sections: Show app info Manage App Structure Manage App Contents Manage the App My recommendation in prepping for becoming certified is to fully understand these two elements of managing your application. What helped me was to write down every option within both app properties and app management onto a note card, then write its description/definition, and finally quiz myself. (ex. Show Relationship Diagram- Can be found under App management and displays a diagram showing how the tables in the app are related) This helped me tremendously understand the difference between properties/management, the options available, and where these options could be found. I encourage everyone to take a deeper dive and click on every single option to understand its function. For more help and information on app properties and app management, please refer to our university courses and our help guides.The Journey of a New Quickbase Builder: Roles and Permissions
As you continue building out your application, you may find that you are collecting/tracking a significant amount of data, and that not all users need access to all the data that is being collected. Some of the data collected may be sensitive or of no real use for the user. If a user has no use for the data, why should the user see the data or have the opportunity to accidently edit/erase data irrelevant to them? Have you ever worked in a shared document and have someone else accidently delete data you need? (I have been the culprit once or twice…) It can be an extremely frustrating and defeating problem to deal with! QuickBase once again, makes it easy to solve for this problem by allowing you to define who will have access to your data and how users can interact with the data. My Key Aha moment: What hit me about roles and permissions was about access to data; not everyone should be able to see, edit, or remove data from an app. So, when you start saying to yourself 'These people need to be able to do 'this' and these people need to be able to do 'that'', that's when it's time to create a new role." For example: from the bakery app I created, I developed two different roles that have access to two different homepages: the boss’s view and the employee’s view. The boss does not need to see the same data as the rest of the team. So, whenever they sign into the application, they will be met with a custom dashboard designed specifically for them; Data they only care about. This can work both ways, both roles having different experiences customized specifically to them when they sign into the application. Visual example: Owner View: Employee View: This is a great way to leverage roles and permissions and it is very easy to do! Managing and creating roles can all be done under Roles settings page as shown below: (This is found under the home settings page) After clicking the roles page, it will lead you to the home screen where you will be able to add new roles, manage users, and edit current roles. New Role Button- Customize new role name, permissions, user interface and properties Manage Users- This will lead you to the users page where you will be able to manage the current users with access to your application, and manage which role those users are in. List of current roles users that can be assigned along with their app level permissions and associated homepage. (Both can be customized) Important to note, that the default roles are Viewer, participant, and administrator. When you click on a role or create a new role, you will be brought to the settings of the role. Here is where you will manage permissions, user interface, and properties of the role. (Shown below) As you can see above, there are three tabs you can work with in editing user roles, Permissions, User interface, and Properties. Permissions Tab (shown Above)- this tab is broken down into two key elements of permissions, App access and Table Access. Self-explanatory in their title. Table access will list all your tables and allow you to set permissions in 7 different elements. Permissions are broken down by View, Modify, Add, Delete, Save Common Reports, Edit Field properties, and fields. Very important tab when editing roles, be sure to click into the drop-down arrows and understand all options available. User interface tab- This tab will enable you to set what is displayed to each role in 3 areas; Homepage, Report displays, and Menu/Table display. Common use case is certain roles do not need to see all the tables listed at the top, this is where you are able to hide those tables from roles. (See page below) The Last tab is the Properties tab. This is where you are able edit the name of the role and add a description to role. Once you have set up roles and their custom permissions, I highly recommend testing out the roles to ensure your roles are set up exactly as you want them to be. QuickBase has feature that will allow you to change out of your role and test as the different role you have created. Very simple to do, when signed into your application, click into your name at the top right and click on the role you wish to test out. (Drop down shown below) *Important note: When you test as a role, you use the app, so any changes that you make while testing are applied to the app. Last piece of advice, I will continue to iterate is that you need to continue building and practicing these key concepts! The more you build, the more comfortable you will become with platform! For more on Managing roles and Permissions please refer to our help guides and our QuickBase University courses. As always please feel free to leave any comments or feedback!The Journey of a New Quickbase Builder: Many to Many Relationships
The most common Quickbase table relationship is a one-to-many relationship as I explained in my previous blog. (Example: One customer can have Many orders) But what if we were in a situation where two tables related as a many-to-many? Example, you have two tables (Students and Classes) where students can have many classes and classes can have many students. You wouldn’t want to solve with a one-to-many format making them both parent and child tables to one another because you would essentially be entering data twice, and it wouldn’t be the most efficient manner in entering information. The best solution would be to create a many-to-many relationship. A Many to Many relationship is a method for connecting two tables that both need to be the parent table, through a third intermediary (or “join”) table. Example: My “AHA” moment: The key to creating the many to many relationships and understanding their flow is the join table. The join table houses any combination of data between the two parent tables, and this is where most of the reporting/data entering should occur. Whenever you want to add information that links your two Parent tables, you do so by adding a record to the Join table. For example, if you want to sign a student up for a course, you would simply add a new record to the enrollments table. Within the new record, select the related class and select the related student. Quickbase makes this easier by adding an Add Enrollments button to each parent table. From within a Class record, you can click the Add Enrollments button to assign a person to that class. You can do the same from within a Student's record. The button adds a new record to the enrollments table that joins a Student and a Class. Visual Example within the Students table: The Many to Many concept has taken me some time to understand. If you’re just starting out on Quickbase and you’re confused on how to set these up, I get it! I’ve been there. I’ve found the best way to understand Many-To-Many relationships is to create a bunch of them within my builder account. I started thinking about all the many to many examples I have in my life and started building out a few of them to help me better understand. One final example I will share is I created an app that revolves around keeping track of different sports leagues. I am a sports junkie and constantly participate in different leagues, so I thought it would be a fun use case to explore. My many-to-many came into play between a Players table and a League table. Players can play in many leagues and leagues can have many players. To join these two tables I created a registration table where my data relates to one another. Again, keep creating! It is the best way to understand the Quickbase platform and journey into becoming an expert builder! For a deeper dive into Many to Many relationships please check out our help guides, live trainings, and our University page. There is also this informative video from Kirk Trachy on YouTube. As always please feel free to add comments or feedback below!The Journey of a New Quickbase Builder: Tables and Relationships
The Journey of a New Quickbase Builder: Tables and Relationships My first attempt at app planning and building my first data model was not as successful as I would have liked. It took me 5-10 tries to create and relate my tables correctly, and with each failed attempt I was getting increasingly frustrated... “Why is this not working?!” Finally, it clicked. It took my many failures in trying to connect my data for me to begin understanding when to create tables and how Quickbase relationships work. Tables and relationships can cause so much overthinking when in fact they can be very simple to understand. Why Relationships? Creating relationships is the foundation of app building. Relationships are built in a one-to-many matter meaning one record in the Master table can relate to many records in the Details table. This will reduce database sizes, data entry, errors, and it enables workflow automation. Figuring out the desired workflow will help you decide how relationships should be created. My “Aha” moments for tables and relationships: Tables are created when you need to track many of a certain object and the object has several data points. In simpler terms these tables are going to be nouns you want to track. Example: Track Many Meetings, Expenses, and Invoices that each have several data points. Example of when not to create a table: if I were tracking the electronics and their life span in my household, I would not want to create a table for each electronic, right? Refrigerator table, TV table, Toaster table etc. That wouldn’t make sense. There aren’t many of each table type, nor several data points to track about them. Who has multiple toasters? No one is the answer. The best way would be to create an Electronics table and add all my electronics under that one common table. Relationships are a connection between two tables that allow tables to share information with one another. It is important to understand that relationships work as a one-to-many (Parent to Child). As seen on my lucid chart video I created an app for a bakery in which I created a relationship where One Customer has Many orders. Understanding the one-to-many concept made my life easier in understanding relationships and when to create them. Visual Quickbase example: The picture above shows a visual example of what happens when tables are connected In Quickbase. Candidates have many Interviews, as you can see interviews references the candidates by their application ID and the interviews information is sent up to the (parent) Candidates table. The add child button is automatically created in the relationship so under the candidate you can add an interview instead of going to the interviews table. The report link is also automatically created that shows all the interviews of that candidate. Essentially all information can be entered into the Candidates table. Note: An Interview can also have many Candidates. But I’m not blogging about many-to-many relationships yet, that will come later…Quit skipping ahead! Final piece of Advice: There is much to learn about tables and relationships, what I have given is a high level of my key understandings that will hopefully get you going in the right direction. What has helped me and continues to help me understand tables and relationships is making them and making mistakes. The more you create the more you will understand. Create Create Create! I would highly recommend using our free builder accounts, visiting our exchange library and viewing/understanding different structures of applications, and of course, making use of our QB university App Building courses. As always please feel free to leave a comment!The Journey of a New Quickbase Builder: App Planning
My first Quickbase app was a disaster. I was so excited after taking the Quickbase orientation course through Quickbase University that I went into my app and immediately started building out my use case. I completely forgot the most important part of app building. App Planning. It didn’t matter that I knew how to create relationships or create tables, without a solid blueprint this app was doomed to fail. There is a reason that App Planning is the first course recommended after orientation which leads me to my first “AHA” moment: App planning is the most important part of app building! This is where you will define what will make an app successful. Without the detailed WHY, app building can be a frustrating and wasted experience. For my second app, I focused on my app planning. The Quickbase University App Planning courses suggests that it will take 74min to complete. To be safe I gave myself 2 hours. In trying to put myself in the shoes of a new Quickbase builder, I committed 20-30 min a day for one week. I wanted to map out all my data points I needed to track and all the different reports I required. I needed a tool to help me do this. I am a visual learner; I learn through live creation. One of the best parts of app planning is QuickBase offers visual integration through Lucidchart. I can’t tell you how helpful this tool has been to me in seeing my process/planning come to life, and the great thing about Lucidchart is that it fully integrates with Quickbase, allowing you to easily transfer your data model. If you are visual learner like me, I highly recommend this tool when creating/planning, and below you will see a quick video on Lucidchart. As always, please feel free to like, share, or leave a comment!The Journey of a New Quickbase Builder: Introduction
What’s up Quickbase Community?! My name’s Francisco Anzoategui (I go by “Kiko”) and I’m a new Customer Adoption Manager here at Quickbase. I’ll be writing a blog series for you called “The Journey of a New Quickbase Builder”, where I can share with you all the lessons learned and “a-ha” moments a new Quickbase citizen developer might experience. Furthermore, I will be mirroring my learning path to those new builders with full schedules. In other words, I will restrict myself to only spending 1-2 hours a week learning from our resources as typically that is the max time new builders are able to allocate per week learning our platform. I will be busting through a lot of self-help resources like Quickbase University, Empower Content, our Exchange apps, and very excited to share my experiences. For new builders to the Quickbase community, I’d love to be a sounding board for feedback, ideas, and challenges you’re running into so I can help you get through them. I’ll be putting together some written and video content for the entire community to have access to, and I’ll be sharing it right here! A little about me…I’m a military brat, I grew up in Italy, but I live in Boston now. I’m a sports NUT. I love both Footballs, American and what the rest of the world refers to as Futbol. I just got married in Aruba, a few days after being offered this job, so it’s been a wild and crazy few months for me, but it’s been fun! I’ve been working in Customer Success for the past five years, but this is my first jump into the no-code/low-code landscape. I’m fired up to learn Quickbase and share with you along the way. Lastly, for those of you in Education or the Non-Profit space, I’ll be the Admin overseeing the Education/Non-Profit Customer Network. If interested, please fill out a form . Come join us! This will be a great way for you to connect with others in your field. Looking forward to meeting as many of you as I can! Best, Kiko Anzoategui
