Deploying Your Mobile Apps: Deep Dive Webinar 10.27.16 | AppSheet

and we will be talking about deployment if you could all just mute your sound just to make sure that there's no background noise before we get started that would be really helpful and just as a heads up this presentation will be posted on our YouTube page and you will also get a follow up email with a link to the recording so without further delay we'll go ahead and get started and I'll hand it over to Praveen hi everybody so if you've attended any of these webinars before you know that Santiago is usually the person who who does it but he's not in town this week so you get me our topic today a deployment and um let me make sure that everything's okay on the screen there oh good all right so deployment is actually a sort of step in the overall lifecycle of working with your app and so just to put it in context there's a create phase when your person you you first build your app you test it then you deploy it you get this app in the hands of the other users and then once it's deployed there's a couple of post deployment steps as well you update the app perhaps or you actually have a significant change to be happen that you can call an upgrade so really today we're talking about the deployment stage to the extent that if you've used actually before you know that as soon as you build an app this app is something that you can run on your phone and you can actually share with a few other people so even in that test phase there is an element of deployment deployment because this app is being deployed to to you to your phone and to other test users but we're not going to focus on that too much we just sort of going to focus on the deployment phase as its laid out in that flow the topics we'll cover today the core deployment concepts what is a prototype version of an app versus a deployed version a couple of different aspects of deployment of different mechanisms what we called instant deployment versus the white label deployment of traditional deployment and then the things you can do after you deploy and then we take some Q&A and actually if you have questions along the way we can take those as well yeah so there's actually a question pane kind of towards the right from the panel so feel free to drop your questions in throughout the hour and we'll probably spend about 5-10 minutes towards the end of session answering those questions so moving on the core context so there are basically two mechanisms that you can use to deploy mobile apps button actually one mechanism is what we call instant deployment and with this make this is the default mechanism and with this mechanism you have no friction and no delays between the time you create an app and the time that you can actually get this app running on your mobile phone now this is usually a surprise to people because you expect what we've come to sort of expect is that to get an app running on the phone you need an app and an app store therefore there needs to be some code generated needs to be somehow submitted and approved in an app store and then deployed out of there but that is not the instant deployment mechanism what we're doing this in deployment is you're actually using an existing app in the App Store which actually has already put there and went because that app already exists the app that you build is actually just hosted within it and to actually get this app that you built in front of your users all you have to do is send them a URL and we're gonna walk through the details of this but at a very high level you send them a URL they click on it and a couple of clicks they have a working app on the phone so your bypass in the app stores in this process and that's actually quite suitable for small environments for small teams you know exactly who's going to be using the app and so on the traditional deployment model is actually as the name suggests what most consumers are familiar with in order to get an app on their phone they have to find it in an app store and install it and for you as an app creator to produce an app that participates in this traditional deployment process you use apps you to create what we call a white label app in other words it's an app that's got a name a standalone thing that you can then submit to iTunes or Android stores and that's actually really good if you're putting an app into the NAP store that you need your customers to discover and find rather than you're explicitly asking specific people to install it so these are sort of the two high level approaches ways of building deploying apps all right so we're gonna sort of dive into back to that sort of the phases of your building Iraq you've created a initial version of an app and we have two states that an app can be in it could be in a prototype state or it can be in a deployed State so in a prototype state you start out there you're trying out an app all the features are available but it's limited to just a few users who can test it and then you take it through a step we call the deployment check and when you get through the deployment check the app is going to be marked deployed and at that point you're using this app for real in a bit this is an organization in some real setting and the features you can use in the app depending the fan you're in and of course you can actually use it with a larger number of users so you want to in old stage in all apps go through that sort of life cycle if you get created you're in the prototype phase and then they go through a deployment check and they get to a diploid phase so that's sort of the concept of prototype versus deploy so let's sort of switch over to actually looking at an app walking through a couple of these steps so then a break out of the presentation mode here go to my browser which will see what we can do my browser all right so I need to collapse a few of these things that I have set up on my device I count my apps I'm logged in here too actually and have a lot of apps so it may take a minute to come up all right and I'm gonna you know I'm just gonna use one of these apps that I have let's just make a new app just to keep it simple make a new map and I've got to pick a category let's say it's Field Service and I'm going to create an app based on the service log so I'm just creating a brand new app here and so as we should expect this app would be in a prototype phase and it takes a minute to setup and while I'm doing this I'm gonna try to see if I can set up an ability to show you what's actually going to happen in my phone as well so let that be well that fleet seems to be taking its time this morning oh we have some deployments in process alright there is um so I have a simple app but the really interesting thing is over here to the at the top on the left you see that it's not being mocked at deploy so this app has been created and it's in a prototype phase so assuming I'm sort of happy with this app I have no warnings if I have any warnings or errors they would show up here in the info tab but right now I have no one engine errors because it's a fine app um I'm going to decide that I'm going to do a deployment check because I'm happy with this app and I want to take it to the deployed state so I click on that not deployed which is the same as the managed slash deploy pane and I open the deployment check it says it appears ready to deploy address any warnings because it's run a deployment check it gives me some potential warnings which I need to look at but there are no errors so I've got a green check box on that it asks me to assign a launch icon and an apt description we'd really recommend that you do this because the launch icon is what your users will actually associate with your app you don't want to use the defaults like this little red thing that we provide because many apps will have the same icons we check on a variety of things and the number of checks in here are going to increase over time because we want to actually make sure and verify that your app is going to run well once deployed also we check the account status then any features that you're using in this app are actually supported by the plan you're on and if not you may see in any of these things if there's ad blocker to your deployment you may see a red box you can click on the details to find out what you need to do about it but since this is all green or it's just warnings with yellow I'm going to move the app to a deployed State and by moving after the deployed state now you notice up here that happens Marcus it's deployed so you've just been through the deployment check and what the app is deployed any questions on this so far correct so I'm going to sort of switch back to the presentation we have just taken this app for the prototype phase to the deployed phase to a deployment check so as we talked about the deployment check is checking on a variety of different aspects of your app and then you're ready to do deployment and you can do this deployment through the instant deployment mechanism or to the traditional the white label app mechanism and we'll talk about both your instant deployment and some people realize this in some to not so it's good to sort of reinforce ice the absolutive bill can run in a mobile device or they can run in a browser so first in Paris I will show you the app running in a browser and then we'll try and see if I can reflect what's running on my phone right up here on the screen so that you can also see the deployment process on the phone right so first here is my app that we just built and I'm going to click on preview and you see a number of preview options and one particularly interesting option is full screen and if you look at the URL up there here's this app running full screen in a browser and if you look at that URL up there which I've highlighted that URL is really says app sheet account so I start and then the ID of the app that URL allows you to run the app in a browser it also allows you to run the app in an iframe which is hosted in another page so you can host your apps you tap within a broader web page there are some restrictions for that which we can cover later but generally speaking most apps around can run in a browser or in the mobile app or mobile app alright so coming back to where we were I'm going to go to my phone and I'm gonna install this app there's a little quick she's not here as to whether or not I can project my phone onto out of the screen so bear with me please while we try to do that struggle so we may not be able to quite do that at the moment in lieu of that what I'm going to bring up is I'm gonna bring up screenshots of what you will see when you deploy your app so I'm gonna this is our helpdesk which really are all our help documentation and has pretty extensive documentation about deployment so I'm looking for the section and deployment and here is a an article about deploying from an install link so unfortunately because I cannot quite get my phone to show up right here on my screen for this my presentation Oh we'll look at what it looks like when you try to deploy your phone all you have to deploy to deploy an app to your users all you have to do is send a link and when they click on that link on the phone it opens up something that looks just like this so you have a page this is the how it looks on Android maybe a look at iOS after this but you get a page that actually asks you this the name of the app and it says install the app and clicking on the install button brings down the app sheet host app from the App Store and then it installs a an icon on the home screen of the device so this is the first step it asks you to install app sheet from the App Store click OK and then after that it actually installs the icon phone there's a fallback experience for older versions of Android that we won't worry about we can also think look at the Safari and iOS because if you're on an iPhone or iPad and you click on the install link it brings up a similar looking page and it gives you two choices if actually it is not installed and asked you to click on that to install a cube it goes to the App Store and brings down the app feet happen installs it and then you click on the second button that actually installs the app you have here with your icon your logo and it shows up on the home screen so that's sort of the instant deployment process and once you have done that that app is lunchable like any other app on your phone any questions on this yeah eventually it's just going to look like an icon on your phone and once you click on it you install it we move back to a presentation the traditional deployment process requires a little more work on the part of the app creative the basic idea is that you build your app an app sheet exactly the same way but then you go through a step where you create a rule like label version of your app that white label version produces you an artifact that you can test on devices and then submit to the App Store's home and then you go through an approval process with the App Store and once it's proof that shows up in the app stores so I will sort of walk you through this we have as of today 26th 27th of October we have the white label mechanism working and supported for Android and we expect sometime in the next few days literally within the next week we will have this also available for iOS so let's look at how that's done so I'm still in the deploy in the managed deployed pain but you see there's a section for what they will add so I'm gonna click on that and that gives me the option to create a white liberal version of this app for Android devices again sometime in the next week that will also be an option to create a white paper version for iOS devices so I'm going to click this and that's really all I really needed to do because a request got sent to the back end and sometime within the next 10 minutes I will receive a confirmation email that produces a white label version of this app saves it in some place that I can download and that white label version of the app is an apk so for people familiar with Android it's an apk it's a package but then you can install on your phone you can installment some test phones you can place it in an enterprise app store or you can submit it to the Google Play Store for approval it's as simple as that now the iOS version will require a little more interaction because there are more steps to follow up and we'll talk about that back in a little bit one thing that's really important to understand with the white label or traditional deployment process is with AB sheet all we can do is we can generate the package that needs to be used and submitted to these app stores but you would be as an app creator you would be actually following the procedures to submit this out to the app store and get it approved some of these procedures with the Google Play Store are pretty straightforward and the approval times pretty short you should be able to get your app approved and deployed in a matter of hours on the other hand where the iTunes Store the approval the processes are more honors we document a bunch of steps but the really important thing to understand is that the iTunes Store does not necessarily approve every app they various standards for what kinds of a blip we don't and so really that um you do need to make sure you understand those those processes and those requirements that each of these place doors at the each of these app stores imposes all right finally after you deploy your app and you get it in the hands of the first set of customers it is really common to change the app because you come up with new features your customers tell you users tell you that you need to add something or you need to change something and so you have to think through how that's going to happen so there's two ways to think about those changes for mine the first one the first category we call app updates and that's really meant for minor changes so let's say you need to change the order in which a particular view is sorted or you need to change the color theme or those bunch of minor changes these minor changes can be made directly in the app definition so again I'm going to escape out back to the app we were in let's say I'm looking at the UX tab and instead of a tabular view I'm gonna have a deck view of my data let's save the changes the apps to mark deployed and in fact the next time if if we have deploy this app to some users every one of those users would see the change we just made the presentation of the data has changed we did see it immediately and they'd see at the moment they sync that here so that would be an example of an app update I mentioned this explicitly you know most people using app sheet I sort of have taken this for granted it's a two-edged sword so on the one hand your changes are immediately seen just terrific on the other hand if you make errors or things you know make changes you didn't really want to happen your users will see those immediately as well so we have a mechanism which is not quite ready yet but will be coming soon which might which allows you to lock a particular version of the actually your users will see in the particular version and as you make changes they won't quite see those changes until they decide that they are ready to be saved so that's a sort of an enhancement that will be coming soon so that's sort of the update route but sometimes there's more significant changes that you need to make there's a very significant difference in the nature of the app and so you use the app upgrade path for that and that upgrade path to really build a separate app you keep the data in sync with the data from the original app and at some point in time you explicitly switch over from from the new app that you've created you effectively switch it over to being the new version of this app and I won't go into it in much detail here but there's some good documentation about it I just want to make sure people aware that that mechanism exists and it's actually sort of a the preferred mechanism in environments where it's really important not to break your users so that's really sort of the this quick can simple walkthrough of the set of capabilities around the concept of deployment so I'm I think it's time for any questions you might have and so we have a question from Anne she said that she's trying to create a manual with some of these steps included for her users we share smooth information so she can add it to her manual and actually and this presentation will be available on YouTube so you can definitely just take a look whenever you want you'll also receive a follow-up email with a link to the presentation so you'll be able to watch this as many times as you like and include that information all right Mike has a question he's asking well version lock increased the sync speed for apps not upgrading to a new version good question Mike no version lock is actually more stability it's a stability feature when it comes to the synchronization time we have a number of improvements to the synchronization time that are actually in flight at the moment we probably should talk about them in a sort of in a separate forum but there's very little time spent in the sync process on actually fetching the app tip let's the app definitions most of the time is actually spent in fetching the data and we have a bunch of improvements happening there that will hopefully get deployed pretty broadly by early November Giorgio's has a question he's asking a white label app can only contain a single app or is a similar sorry give me one second can a white label app only contain a single app or can users upload other apps to the same developer from the same developer so let me sort of a services are two levels a white label app is identical to a it's just an action app we're all it contains is the one app that you built now so as a developer of apps if you built five different actual apps and you produced five different white label versions of each of them you converted into a white table app each of them would be distinct and often that's what you want so you get five distinct apps and they are unrelated with each other from the point of view of your users because they all are the same developer let's say in the iTunes Store through that you in store they might find other apps by that developer so that's sort of one route another route is something that didn't we did not talk about today but it's a concept we have which is app launchers so you can build an app sheet app that is effectively a launcher other apps that you built so let's say you have a suite of five different apps that you want your users to be able to use you build a launcher which is a top-level app that says pick one of the five that you can launch and you certainly white labeled that and so if you're white label that then it acts as a launcher for these other apps that you have and that mechanism works fine to run into you know he's made changes in the app and then some users can't think to their back-end since they're working on a prior version so is there any tips yeah that's a great question in fact that would be part of a deep dive around how to update and upgrade your apps oh let's spend sort of a few there's been a minute on this the the most important thing is the structure of the data so let's say if we have this app and it has a table with six columns in it and the app allows users to capture some new information and bring it back to the backend so they're capturing six different fields of information and it's going to get stored back and then the comment you know the the problem arises when let's say you remove one of those columns from this back and spreadsheet you might be doing that because there's a new app that you build a new version of the app you're building doesn't need that extra column but you've got these users out and they've got a version this happen if connected some data and they're trying to sync these changes back and then suddenly they've got six rows six columns to to put in but there's only five columns in the sheet and so that's kind of when actually throws up his hands and says hey we've got a you've got an old version of the app here and there's a mismatch there's nothing we can do this so in general data changes are the most complicated because there's no automatic mechanism that our system can determine to figure out how you want to map this data so what we actually strongly recommend is that if you're making changes that actually involve structural change in the backend data then you want to find a way to actually quiet so in other words ask get your users to pause using the app wait a minute has change so you can certainly make the change in a you try this whole thing out and you know you tried out your new HAP and your testing and everything else but then you do not want to have some users out in the field collecting data with a different structure for the data and then your back-end changes and anything we do have some ways you can recover they sort of queued up updates that cannot be synchronized but you really it's sort of bad for the users and and overhead for you so you want to avoid that if possible when you have user security enabled yeah the the security concepts are completely orthogonal other words independent of whether it happens white labeled or not so if your app requires you to sign in then it requires you to sign in it's but default it's hosted in you know with the instant deployment route it would be hosted in the actual app with white label you get your own app to host it but one way the other if user sign in is required and you've white labeled it the users are going to be asked to sign it so it's going to function exactly the same way so is asking if there are any apps in the App Store that have been created by AB sheet that they can look at yeah in fact we should get I don't know if there's a way to send some links out maybe afterward yes yeah but there's a there's a couple absent the on the on the Android at you know in the Android wettable apps there's quite a few apps built in Google Play and we have some sample apps also that we can show you with iTunes because it's a little early we only have two customers we've sort of worked with inside of a private beta fashion to get their apps built and ones around cancer data and the other one is actually for a big an event called sea fair that's held in Seattle every summer and that actually is a pretty wrap with a lot of data in it because it's got information about hydroplane races and race cars that every drivers and teams and lots of images and links to webpages so that's something we can definitely put out there for you to see yeah in the follow-up email that you'll be getting with the link you should expect that these apps look and behave exactly the same as your actual apps except that they will not have a link to go back to your app gallery because there is no app gallery it's just your app we've gotten some questions about pricing for white labeling so some people are asking what plan is applied for the app launcher kind of white label app and then another person has asked about publisher lysis licensing and then there's different pricing for iOS versus Android yeah we yeah we're trying to keep the pricing relatively simple so you as you know we have two kinds of plans you got per app plans and put user plans so the very high level you want to use a per app plan if the app you're building is meant for public consumption so it's a Anna I meant for general consumers or your customers but it has no confidential data in it so you want as many of them as possible to install the app and after an event or an app for you know a catalog of products or a store or stuff like that and so if you're in a poor app plan we call them publisher plans um and you want to put a white label it you need to be in a publisher pro plan right and if you're the publisher pro plan which I think at the moment $50 per app you get to be able to white label it and you can white label it for Android and for iOS when we make that public sometime in the next few days so it's is that if you want to pre user plan you should be using the per user plan whenever you have an app being built within a company within an organization 14 and if there's any data there that's confidential in any way in other words if you don't want your data be showing up in a website somewhere then it should be on a per user plan with the signer it's really trying to emphasize the importance of security around the data and in the per user plan again to be able to white label it you should be on a pro plan so in both cases whether it's per app or per user the white cable features part of the pro plan and it's either the publisher pro or the per user Pro once again so after we deploy a launcher app do we also have to do the same for the apps that are listed Kristin come actually I don't think you need to do this think of those are the white labeling mechanism is simply a way to get a you're getting a native app wrapper into the App Store that can be deployed and it's gonna host the app that you asked to host now that app could go launch other apps and then you're just fine it's gonna work seamlessly so you don't really need to write cable every single app that's launched from The Watcher what if I have an app that I want to copy and deploy to an individual but I do not want it in my apps and just want it to be used by that person so let's see if we can get that scenario clear you're the app creator person a and actually where this come from Braden yeah so Braden you built an app and then you want to get this you want to share this app somehow with somebody else who should make a copy of it and be able to run with that app they're actually the simplest mechanism of that is exactly what I just said which is you can make that other person the collaborator so they can actually work with you on the same app and ask them to make a copy or you can make your app publicly visible by marking it as such it shows up in a public portfolio of your apps and then they can copy it from there too but a copy of the app would be the way to go that's a really interesting question this is less about deployment and really more about data sources so there are some applications where you one each user to have their own source of data and so the simplest example would be lets say you have built an app that had some shared set of information let's say a list of a list of books that are of interest to a book club as it's just a simple example and then each member of the book club this a you're going to use this app you had to read the books in there to take personal notes and each of them would have their own copy of their notes so we have a mechanism for something this is called a private table so if you mark your a table within the app is a private table each person gets their own personal copy so that's sort of the sort of the most obvious way that each user gets their own copy of data now your question might be a sort of deeper question which is a suppose I built an app that connects to Salesforce or connects to a sequel server database and does you know how they behave a certain way and I want to give this app now to a customer so that they can connect it to their our Salesforce instance um so something that's more complicated it's not a straightforward deployment process what you really want to do is make sure you they copy your app and they configure it to their data source is it required to add users to the whitelist before having this app out in the wild and the Google Play or the iOS store or is that something that you do after great question so Richards question is actually similar to the previous question which is the security model is completely independent of the white label so if your app requires sign-in then when a user tries to use it they're going to be asked to sign it and if their email is not on the whitelist it's gonna fail so this is the case where the app is white labeled or not so really sort of the the simplest answer would be you probably want to get the users you want onto the wet list now in practice we're sort of stepping back for this for a second in practice very few for customers go to white label behalf right away so the standard pattern is really going to be you work with the app you prototype you test you use instant deployment with your first set of users you make sure the app is really what you want and then when you're ready to go big you consider whether you want a white label it whether it's worth the effort and the cost and the whether it's actually what correlates to what your users want but but at that stage it's a white cleaning obviously makes a lot of sense for b2c kind of apps for the publisher consumer facing public apps it's a little more of a question mark we're still learning what a customers want around the business internal apps because in some cases you wanted in some cases you don't you know if some pieces is just fine staying with the instant deployment path deploying an app to cluster customers using the same sheet just like managing different teams large and small with like a central monitoring system so I need to actually understand the question a little better I don't know if our patient you could just sort of clarify that a little bit because I want another question maybe circle back to this one and if any clarification you could have in that would help me can I send users the apk link to install on their phone without going through Google yes and I should emphasize this earlier nothing I just mentioned it in passing oh when you go create an Android white label laughs you know the step we just we followed but you would receive an email within a few minutes with a link to a place where you can download an apk in the apk for people not familiar with Android just it it's it's like a package that contains this app now that package can be used to just install on a phone and especially people who are developers on our devices know exactly how to do that it's pretty straightforward you can distribute this apk to other people you can put that it became what's going on enterprise app store which is a larger organizations to have effectively repositories of these apks for their internal users or you can submit that apk to the Google Play Store for public for approval for public consumption so all of those are it's just an apk and I'm using all the standard ways in apk is Marc is asking about deployment with private date what is the procedure I'm not sure Marc what a private date is so if you could clarify that to appreciate it if this can be done without signing if the question I think marks question if if your question is can you do private data okay yeah no private data works only if the users signing it because really they're each users trying to keep their data private and so it needs a place to be kept and it's actually kept in there this sign in with some cloud storage sign-in ID and that's where the data is kept so yeah private data or sort of intimate they tied to requiring sign-in for the apps are not necessarily deployment related employment related so we can maybe start diving into some of those there's no I think there's a deployment question that can we deploy apps for okay yeah there's more so can we deploy apps for a particular valid period with a start and end date we don't have a mechanism for this at the moment I mean it's an interesting idea we we sort of build up features based on what customers asked for so if this actually turns out to be quite a few customers asking for this kind of function it's something we could include at the moment we leave it to you so it's really up to you to decide whether you wanted to try an app or not just this last week we introduced a mechanism which allows you to explicitly pause an app so that you can basically block any new updates that are coming in from any user of the app and we put in this pause mechanism really for the sort of use case which is you've got an app running you would need to do some maintenance to the backend data and it don't want it to be polluted with changes from users but that's an example of something we put in because a customer asked for it so I could see us potentially down the road doing something like what you're asking about but not as we don't have that at the moment so Stephen is asking how does private table compare to a slice oh great okay let's see how to bring this right so this is a simplest case is let's think of a single table it's maintained it's just one spot let's say it's a Google cheat it's in the Google cheat and I have built the app so I'm the creator of the app and I distribute it to five other people in my team so all of them can interact with this data through the app and if any of them make changes that data is actually going to end up back in the central table all right so that's sort of the basic case we call that a shared table we have some mechanisms to allow each user to see these subsets of the data it's two mechanisms for this one mechanisms a slice mechanism the other is a security filter we always recommend that if you really need to make sure each user sees only a subset of their data of this shared common data the security filter is the secure way to go the way that works is you require sign-in on the app based on the sign-in we know the user's email and it can actually set up a filter condition that says only show this user the data that corresponds to their email right so that would be the preferred route to go if you want if you have a shared data set and you want each person to see just a secure subset of it that corresponds to maybe what they should see our private tables are very different concept the person that the concept of a private table is actually an entire table that you want each person have a separate copy of that they can independently modify without each without seeing each other's data so it's particularly useful in environments you know let's say there's a bunch of sales people working on leads it's quick offer a comment and sort of sales environments for sales reps to be competitive so they don't necessarily want to share all their notes about leads and opportunities with every other sales rep so that's not of a good example where you might have a common table of you know customer information but each put your app may have a separate table which is sales reps notes and that might be a private table because each of them effectively gets a copy the structure of all those tables are the same but the rules in them are gonna be different for each user and then each user only sees their entire table so almost think of it as it's a coarser grained security sort of isolation mechanism then there's sort of security filters and slices and I know that sort of naked hand wavey because we should probably do a deep dive at some point about that class of that that discussion needs its own deep dive I past came back and clarified a little bit so maybe we can answer his question now so just to clarify consider I have an app with a private sheet and I want to deploy the app to team number one the same app with the same sheet to team number two and monitor both teams how do I do that yeah so there's a number of possible so rich up patterns here right the patterns we support are a single shared table that every user of the ab c--'s or you could have a table that a private table where every user gets their own copy of the app copy of the table when you need to do some ritual combinations we actually suggest make a copy of the app that way so we don't sort of have notions of a table that's private to a certain subset of users but not private to another subset of users also just as a matter of sort of a matter of interest a very few of our customers currently his private tables most of the time what they actually use the security filters so to your order scenario they keep all the data across all the teams in one common sheet shared table but then therefore column in the table that says you know which team does this each of these rows belong to so some belong to team one something on the team two and then they have another table which is given the email address of the user which team do they belong to and so with that information you can easily set up security filters that make sure members of a particular team see only a certain subset of the rows of the data and so security filters it's almost always the right answer and private tables are really sort of a mechanism to be used in certain special cases how do I change the data source on a periodic basis for archiving without affecting my box yeah that's a great question in fact it was it was this specific request that actually put a make made us put in the pause mechanism so right now you can go to in fact I'm going to see if I can show you that so I'm going to the manage tab and the deploy tab and you see a pause button over here so I can pause there and resume it when I pause it it locks any updates coming in at that point in time so I'm going to click on pause and take a second and then your refreshes and it's gonna be paused and you know this now it gives me a chance to at this point in time if I try to actually update the date if there's a user out in the field who's trying to synchronize some changes back in they're gonna fail he's gonna be told the app has been paused wait so this is so the pattern would be pause your app change the data source make sure the structure is exactly the same and then you go click on resume and that's sort of the way to do it no I did it down the road you'd want that automated and so on we don't quite have to make it amiss to manual at the moment yeah it's a common request so we'll it'll be somewhat non-trivial to do but it's a common request so it's in a queue but I don't have any any new information on that at the moment sure what that means oh yeah so you've continuing like a live match score great so not in the moment so that's a great question can we handle things like live feeds and do a good job with it right now the apps the design is very much for data the actual design work offline and so they have this pattern of bringing the data you need down to the device and then you work with it offline in your synchronize it so that sort of really been the sweet spot in the nature of apps now it is very much a plan an intent to support live feed data things like the data sources like to talk data weather you know search results so there's a number of online sources of data that are interesting that you can build apps with we have them in prototype phase but it's not yet something that we can set a timeline on I'm hoping sometime in the first part of next year some of those things would be available using forms and multiple people use the app will the backend data be compiled in the same sheet if so what is the limit it can hold great question yes so if you think of forms google forms are just a is just a user interface definition mechanism to say here's the data I want collected into a Google sheet so the Google sheets now you're a single shared database or table and you build an app off of that now multiple users can be using this app to submit data and of course all the data goes back into the same form so all compiled as you say into one form um what are the limits on that um there's really the same limits of the limits on a Google sheet with it so we actually have an article in our help around the live data size limits but Google sheets can scale really pretty well so you're unlikely to hit a limit there I know this sheets with millions of rows and very rare they do have a format that many entries multi-select dropdowns or check boxes for example a user chooses five items how is the data stored in their sheets yeah so there's a disis standard sort of data modeling kind of question so if you we have multiple sort of ways to model this if you want to multi select we call them an inn if we call it an enum list this store just is a list of values in a single cell so that's sort of a really simple way of doing it you can choose to structure your data size you have multiple rules for each selection so we have some patterns we have an example in our sample it's called Auto capture sample you'll see an aside it's a purchase order and a bunch of order detail entries in each of them it's a separate row so you can't have that structure or you can have a simpler structure yeah so this is you share has sort of different meanings I think you probably mean I want to show how this app is being built so other people can look at it but I don't want to actually have people use my use my app with its underlying data my interact our recommendation on that would be make a copy of your app um when you make a copy of your app it'll make a copy of the data as well but it also got a copy of all the structure of all the sheets then you go into that and just remove all the data and just leave it with some dummy data in it and make that share that app so that way you've got the pattern that you want but you're not sure you do take one or two questions and we have admin user to control the corporate app yeah okay so this is we'll do a speed round of questions yes there's actually mechanisms coming and we have which allow like an IT manager or admin user to manage multiple accounts and so be able to look at the apps across these different accounts so that's a feature that's actually in the works and we should have before the end of this year so I see a question about Google sheets and it's limit on the number of cells so if there's you have two million cells of limit if if your app you think happened will have a limitation with millions of entries and you need to go beyond that I strongly suggest you something like sequel server because we support that as well there's a question about how to create analytical reporting based on the info entered into the app we largely stay out of this because your data is collected into a spreadsheet you can run reports against it yourself this question about major changes your changes make a copy of the app how do I transfer the plan that I bought using the formula great question so your plan is associated with an account not with an app so just but your new app in the same account and then you can transfer stuff over a couple more is there any mechanism available other than private data Jill I want to determine the source of the data I want to know who submitted the data and wanting user environment awesome question there's two ways to do this we have an audit log and B we took a look at and B there's actually a way to set up the app to use the app users identity for updates so if your back-end will say Google sheets it has an audit history telling you who did the updates last question I guess let's say have a PDF file in my app I click the button to send the email the PDF son able to view how the views yes well there's a pretty complicated question we'll take this particular one from Adam Weber offline and see if we can follow up on email because probably other time if you want to drop it on the community that's probably a good place to get your questions answered I think we got to everyone's question but if there's anything that you have left again community action calm is a great place to drop your questions and we'll get back to you as soon as possible again thank you so much for joining us thanks to Peruvian first time today and that we will send a follow-up survey after this so if you can please fill out anything that you'd be interested in hearing about an upcoming webinar that would be really helpful for us and a recording of this webinar will be sent out in a follow-up email so keep an eye out for that other than that I think that's it for today so thank you so much and we will see you in the next webinar thanks everybody

Channel: AppSheet

Views: 7,248

Keywords: Mobile, Apps, Deploying mobile app, Create your own app, AppSheet, app builder, how to make an app, webinar, deploy an app, iOS, Android, play store, app launcher, white label, white labeling, publish an app, publish an app to google play, publish an app to app store, diy, how to, powerapps, google sheets, excel, spreadsheet, create an app, deep dive

Id: 0cLomp4vPlw

Length: 56min 38sec (3398 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 27 2016