Agilebase platform blog: recent updates

Oftentimes, there’s lots of really useful and interesting data embedded in systems – as soon as people start using an agileBase system, be that just one department, division or for many different uses across an entire organisation, then patterns and trends will start to appear in the information being processed. They could involve sales figures, lead times,…

With the release of a new product built with the agileBase platform coming soon (we’re all very busy here!), we’ve been polishing the system and doing some work to make sure that first time users can get all the help they need if and when they need it. There’s some new introductory help (see the video at…

Here’s an addendum to last week’s update about letting users manually trigger workflows (chains of actions that run behind the scenes). You can now set them up to trigger not just for particular views, but for individual records. What that means is a user can run simple or complex custom tasks with the click of a button. Generating…

You may know of workflows, or automations in agileBase. These are automatic tasks that run in the background, to do things like send emails from the system, generate PDF documents or create/update records. Due for release tomorrow is a new feature that leverages the workflow engine to massively increase the power of the user interface. In…

Sometimes agileBase changes are made by developers, using agileBase as part of a larger infrastructure, e.g. interfacing with a website or third party applications, like accounting systems for example. We’ve now introduced some features that will make that work easier to carry out. Setting internal field IDs Usually when a new field is created in…

There are a couple of places in agileBase where an a system administrator can describe in a broad outline the purpose of a table or view. Recently we’ve seen people working on projects with an increasing number of collaborators and have seen the need to expand this system to apply in other places in the administration interface.…

From a developer’s point of view, the agileBase platform can be thought of as, at it’s heart, a tool for building database applications. The starting point is building and connecting tables and views, then of course the platform supplies lots of additions: the great user interface, powerful business logic, workflows, security rules etc. We’ve always tried to…

This week we release two major feature updates that improve data validation, both when entering new data manually and importing from spreadsheets. Validation checks As you may know, field properties give some control over the data that can be entered. For example, a field may be marked ‘unique’ to disallow duplicates, or the allowable options…

Thanks to Jeff at Argenta for suggesting our newest feature – quick filtering of dropdowns and tag fields. Here’s an example of filtering a list of expenses by category. Previously when filtering, you’d have to know what you were searching for. If you needed a reminder, you could of course hover over the column heading…

Administrators! If you’re not aware of our documentation, check out http://agilebaseadmin.wordpress.com A few pages have recently been added, notably how to set up company-wide variable fields (e.g. VAT rate), troubleshooting views/calculations and troubleshooting view cloning. We’re aware there’s still a lot to do but it’s gradually getting more comprehensive.