Estimated duration: 1 hour
Introduction
When you are new to the Novulo platform, it can be quite overwhelming as there are a lot of topics to explore. This exercise will help you to focus and allows you to check whether you know all of the basics yet. Once you have completed this exercise, you should have a good foundation to tackle more advanced exercises.
What you are about to learn
- How to do navigate within a Novulo application
- What are key elements of the Novulo platform
Prerequisites
- A personal training environment.
Contact your Novulo consultant if you do not have access to a personal training application for exercises yet. Most exercises only work in combination with a selected set of training data and not in any application.
1. Navigating a Novulo application
If you get stuck, read the following posts:
A) What is the ‘More’ Menu in a Novulo application?
B) How can a user add a new tile to the start screen of a Novulo application?
Name 3 different possibilities
C) How can a user add columns to a grid?
D) How to filter out all contacts where the name does not contain “Nov” AND starts with “N”? What search query do you have to enter in de “Search” field?
Solutions
B)
- In “All apps” you can add a new tile to the start screen by clicking on a light grey push pin.
- You can right-click on the breadcrumbs path, to add a tile to that page on your start screen via the context menu.
- Right click on the grey area on a page and choose the option ‘Add to startscreen’ from the context menu
C)
Choose the gear icon on a grid, and then “columns”. Then drag available columns onto the grid.
D)
The following search sting will give the desired result: ~!Nov ~<N
~!stands for “does not contain”~<stands for “starts with”
View all available search operators in the application. They differ per data type (string, date, int…)
2. Grid features
If you get stuck, read the following post:
A) How to export data in a grid to an Excel file?
B) Is it possible to calculate the sum of all numbers in a column for a grid?
C) How to make sure that a custom filter, like ‘Stock is below minimum’ in the picture, is applied even after logging out?
Solutions
A)
Choose the gear icon on the grid and then press the “Export” button. This does not work on all grids because developers have to actively add this feature.
B)
Yes, open the column manager via the gear icon, click on columns and then add a ‘Sum’ footer to the column. Note that the sum might not be calculated for very large tables for performance reasons.
C)
Click on the filter icon on a grid. Then, drag any filter to the top of the list of filters. The first one of the list is always applied by default, even after logging out. You can see that a filter is currently applied based on the orange warning triangle.
3. Novulo terminology
If you get stuck, read the following posts:
A) What is a “Data Concept” in the context of the Novulo platform.
B) What is component revision?
C) What is the Novulo framework?
D) Which steps have to be executed, and in which order, for the update of an existing application with an additional Novulo component?
Solutions
A)
Data concepts are maintained centrally in the Novulo reference architecture to facilitate the reuse of entities. A Novulo ‘concept’ often refers to a table in the database of a Novulo application, e.g. ‘sales’ or ‘products’.
B)
Component
A component is a piece of Novulo software that is built with the Novulo Architect to fulfil a specific business need or to solve a technical problem. Components can, but do not have to, contain the following types of information:
- User interface elements like grids, buttons and fields
- Processes to execute logic and manipulate data
- Functions that return data based on their context
- Data structure to create or extend SQL tables
- Documentation about processes or fields
Component revision
Each component has multiple revisions. When component changes are saved this leads to a new revision.
C)
The Novulo framework contains the default UI elements and basic logic of every Novulo application, regardless of the components that it consists of. The framework defines the basic look of the start screen, grids columns, tiles, fields, forms, buttons, tabs etc. It handles all user interactions in a Novulo application and provides default features like user rights, the expression debugger, performance analysis and more. The most recent framework version is 3.9.
D)
Composing → Integrating → Generating → Installing