This month’s updates cover a range of areas, including documentation, API improvements and user interface improvements.
In the background we’re also working on some major developments to help administrators. All of these improvements aligning with our vision of supporting ambitious organisations across all the phases of their growth. A sneak peek of some of that work is at the end of the page.
New Documentation
With the help of our partners at Little House Consulting, the agileBase documentation has had a comprehensive overhaul. We’ve updated the technology behind it (we now use the Hugo framework with Algolia search), structured and greatly expanded the content to cover every aspect of setting up and developing with ‘no-code’ in agileBase.
There’s still work to do – the introductory sections are in progress and links to relevant documentation pages are being added to the administration user interface for example, but it’s now in a state where it should be useful, so please take a look by going to
https://docs.agilebase.co.uk and clicking the ‘Docs’ link in the top navigation.
Please let us know any early feedback or areas to improve on.
Product Help
As an application builder, you can also add your own custom help for users at many levels throughout an application – field, block of fields, table, tile and view for example.
That help is being displayed in more places. For example, help is displayed as a tooltip when hovering over a form tab. Tooltips also appear for tiles when on the homepage. More updates are planned, so watch this space.
Receiving files via the API
Interactions amongst the many software applications and platforms a business may have, is increasingly important in today’s world. No app is an island!
One of agileBase’s main strengths is it’s comprehensive API which can be used to transfer data in and out of agileBase. Third party integration tools like www.zapier.com help make the process really easy to set up.
Now, as well as accepting data from third parties, agileBase can accept document files. (For example, contract documents generated by a third party system can now be sent to agileBase for storage).
Until now, that has required posting data as multi-part/form data (see documentation).
Now however, an additional option is available – simply supply the URL of a file as the value of a file field parameter when sending data and agileBase will download that file, saving it into the system.
This method is Zapier-compatible,
Thanks to Britannia Windows for requesting this.
Please let us know if you’d like a hand trying this out and we can walk you through the setup.
Inline uploading of documents in a tab
Until now when there was a document field included in an inline editing view under a tab, you could only download documents. Now you can upload them there too. An example could be attaching evidence to a milestone in a project.
Thanks to Foodcase for suggesting this.
Personal Charts
The ability to create charts of data is a popular feature, allowing users to interrogate data and share reports.
Until now, only people with manage privileges (a “manager”) have been able to create charts, but everyone who has permission to view the underlying data has been able to see those charts.
We’re now changing it so that any user can create a chart, but it will be only visible to them. However a manager will be able to view all charts, whoever created them, and can “promote” them so that they are visible to all others. To promote a chart, they need only edit it and remove [username] from the end of the chart title.
Coming up…
If you’d like to be an early beta tester of this functionality, please let me know.
Thanks for reading and we look forward to introducing some more exciting updates in the near future.
Source: Agilebase