10 Tips & Tricks When Building a Knack App
Updated: Oct 17
I have a downloadable PDF on my website where I list 10 very useful tricks, tips, best practices ... or whatever you want to call them ... when building a Knack database app. Here I go through each one, well 5 of them in part 1, then the others in part 2. Check them out, some good stuff.
You can see Part 2 here: www.knackbuilders.com/post/10-tips-part-2-for-building-knack-database-apps
Thanks!
Full Transcript
hey folks uh dave parrish here at knack
builders
uh doing another uh video on some neck
functionality um today's
topic are 10 tips
actually part one i'm just gonna do five
of them and i don't want the video to be
too long and then i'll do another one
with the other five now i have a thing
on my website by the way a little pdf
that you can
enter your email and download these
these are
pretty useful things uh none of them are
really rocket science
and each one of them i probably
addressed in
uh other videos i've done either
in a whole and a lot of uh deep dive
type of stuff
or as parts of other things but um each
one i'm useful so i thought i'd do a
collection of them
right in one video and by the way if you
go to my website
there i am uh
down at the bottom 10 tips you can add
your name
and email and and you'll get that or
not a couple of pages you're going to
end up with a
with a light box popping in right there
and saying hey
let's do this so i'll be back in a
moment and i will
go through those thanks guys bye
[Music]
okay i'm back let's jump into these 10
tips
or best practices or really whatever you
want to call them these are helpful
things that you can often
call upon to improve some functionality
or make things easier for you or just
have a more uh solid app here's the
first one auto increment
date uh created i did a whole
video on this as one of the most
important things you could do but
you know in almost every object or table
i don't care which one it is i'm going
to make one it's called date created
you set it to the current date you can
capture time if you want
and auto increment you may use auto
increment for
for a specific reason used in the live
app
uh invoice number or whatever a
reference number but
this uh if i don't have one something
like that an object i'm still putting
auto increment and often it's just a
behind the scenes feeling
but when you're troubleshooting the back
end
um looking for issues with records
when they were created i mean
depending on your plan you may be able
to go see the history of it
but you gotta drive down and that can
sort of be a pain
this gives you when it was created which
can narrow down
searching for a problem really easy and
it gives every single one of them
you're sure that they have a unique id
so if you're referencing someone you're
working with other people you're gonna
say hey i need number
let's go check out number 55 you're not
saying oh
the one on this stage it's called this
and that no you're going right to it
uh that can be very helpful and then
even further with that if you're
doing some more of the you know slightly
advanced
uploads where you want to match records
instead of just add to them
you're going to make sure you want a
unique id and that's going to be helpful
there
so there's one of them next one re-index
hack
um i'm gonna
you may already know what i'm talking
about but if you create
let's say a
count function i want this to count the
number of line items
for each order well when you first
create this
i'm going to do it right here i'm just
going to say count line item orders
there it is count if i go to the records
go over here that's blank i don't know
when that runs it
at some point it's going to populate
but it's not right now you may need this
because you're working on it you want to
wait around um
now i'm just going to get rid of that
because this is a real app
but i can create i don't even know if i
have it in this one but
let's say i create a multiple choice i'm
just going to call
it i'm going to put a star so i know
it's behind the scenes
and i'm going to call it update and i'm
just going to put one option up
it doesn't matter what these words are
my point is
i now have that field if i go to records
do an update don't i don't need to
qualify it
and sell it to make update
update whatever word you want to use run
that update
what it does is go through all the
records and updates
um and i think it's what's called
re-indexing
it it goes and forces it to do the
things it does
and as a result that
field after you run that almost always
is immediately populated
and other times especially when you have
objects with a whole lot of records in
them
uh you may want to set a task to run
that daily i just ran into this the
other day we had an
aging thing when something was entered
and how long the first step in some
process
uh changed and they wanted to capture
time
um and it wasn't updated it would just
sit there and not change they would go
by the valley would remain the same
um so i made a task to run that similar
thing
every day and that just worked it forces
it if there's ever an issue
to update everything so uh
that's a useful one too let's see what
we got next helpsite.com this is a great
one
sometimes when you're has nothing to do
with knack really but
sometimes when you're you have an app
especially if you're deploying it out to
a number of different users and
they may not be in the same location and
you want to get them you know you want
to teach them how to use it
now you could create a you know word
document
and pdf and you know do something like
that and it's really
sort of a pain help site is a website
it's called helpsite.com
and allows these things that are called
um
i'm gonna get one right here uh
knowledge bases
and here's one for an app we did but
they're interactive
and you can it's really easy to put in
text
just drag and drop images you can put
arrows at a point
here's how you do this don't forget to
do this you can even drop in videos
and show someone how to do something
specifically
they can search uh let's say delete
any article with the word delete is
gonna pre-populate so
it's really professionals and i've done
it a bunch of times and
most of the time i use the free version
too
but there's other ones with higher
levels of anything but
check that out it's a really nice thing
let's see what we got next here
pop-ups and you're probably used to
problems but i love them
let's let's do an example i mean i think
the user experience using pop-ups
is awesome um this is as simple
as this here add order now we're just
grabbing a few pieces of information
and all they have to do is click submit
and this is set to now return to the
parent page
it's best if there's just a few pieces
of information
and you're not nesting pop-ups with
other pop-ups and
other pop-ups that can get weird um
but when they press submit it's just
going to go right back here it's also
really good if you just need to know
something a little bit about this
i don't know it could be whatever you
have a detailed page instead of
advancing
to a whole other page it's gonna be a
pain um
it just pops it up right there and you
see it quick now
let's if this add order
if this wasn't a pop-up it would look
like
this and we don't need all this white
space for this
just to add this a little bit and then
they have to navigate back
or potentially i just don't like it i
like pop-ups and by the way
real quick if if they haven't finished
this and meaning they haven't they've
filled out stuff but haven't clicked
submit
and they click off to the side it's just
going to go away that's
next default it doesn't really bother me
for a lot of my clients it does
there is a uh by the way a piece of code
right here
it's index development docs uh which you
can find
just google mac development docs and
you'll find end up finding this
little tiny bit of code you'd have to
adjust where the scene is
or apply to the whole thing uh and that
will
disable that so if you click off to the
side
it won't get rid of this so sometimes
that's useful
okay now what do we got last one
full width setting i don't know if this
is a big deal to a lot of people
it is i go to every app and make it full
width setting
and i'm going to just give you an
example this and i find a lot of clients
like it too
this is forward setting this this may be
subtle but go to
live app design it's got these and for
the life of me i can't figure out what
either one of these means in terms of
the words that are here
full width on even really big monitors
max width so they don't stretch too what
maybe i'm just obtuse but
regardless if it's max width let's save
it
go back here refresh it so we get it
what it does you got a scroll bar here
and it puts another scroll bar here
you know i mean again this may be so i
know there's some apps i can't recall
which ones there that this it's
really really annoying you you're trying
to scroll up and down and depending
where this is
your cursor is it's scrolling here or
you're inside and scrolling there
um this i'm gonna call it nested
scrolling
can just make things awkward uh
rather i set them all almost all of them
to full width
um it doesn't do that there's no
it's just scrolling one scrolling you're
not going back and forth
um i like it better
that's that okay
next time i'll do these other six so
hold on tight
um that's all i got i appreciate it
folks if you uh
you like this you know how to like it or
ring the bell
or subscribe to my channel i appreciate
it take care thanks