Introducing Function Stack v2 | Edit your APIs like a Google Doc!

hey there my name is prakash I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO of Zano my name is Chris and I'm part of the customer success team at Sano I'm super excited to be doing this uh video because we have been working on this next version of the function stack for a while based on a lot of the feedback uh that we've been hearing from customers customers that have been telling us they want to do things as a team they want to do more group actions and in general they just want a better snappier experience within the function stack to where regardless if they're working in one tab or multiple tabs it just works for them isn't that right Chris yeah yeah absolutely it's it's was always really fun to have these conversations with our users and you know hear about kind of their pain points and also experiencing those same pain points because we all work in Zano every day we feel those same those same pains that you do and we're super excited to just solve a ton of those in this in this massive update yeah and I think that one thing that is important to note is that this is not the end this is the beginning like we have a lot of exciting changes coming to the function stack we just focused on the center panel uh for right now we know that there's a lot of improvements to be done to that right panel um things like autocomplete no more sub path uh you know more room to for longer inputs all of these different things are things that we will be working on so uh we just wanted to come on here and say how excited we are and that we're also open to feedback we hope you love this launch but we'd love your feedback to make it even better yeah 100 I mean all of these changes have been based on user feedback to start so we definitely want to make sure to uh to keep that dialogue open and hear about uh how you're finding these new updates and what we can do to keep improving awesome so with that Chris I'm gonna let you get into it and kind of show people around awesome thanks prakash I'm super excited to talk to you about everything that's new in function stack version 2. so let's get into it team collaboration we've enabled you to edit your function Stacks seamlessly with other members of your team just like a Google doc multi-tab development if you're used to working in multiple tabs we've enabled you to do this inside Zano draft support we've enabled draft support inside of your functions Stacks which means that you are now able to choose when to save and publish new changes this also makes versioning much more meaningful inside of xano we've made huge improvements to run and debug to allow you to iterate and test your function Stacks even faster we've added bulk actions and searched to your function Stacks so you can quickly find what it is you are trying to work on and this is all part of a greatly enhanced user interface and user experience we're super excited to hear what you think about this new update so let me go ahead and show you some of these new features in action first I'd like to just take a little tour of the new user interface inside of the no code API Builder so you can see up here on the left hand side we have greater readability for your API information over here on the right next to our run and debug button we have the team presence indicator which we'll get into here in just a moment we've given you a much wider work area and made several other changes to promote usability and readability inside of the API Builder you'll see more of these updates to the user interface as we go through the new features and the First new feature that I would like to talk about is the enhanced run and debug so you can see I have a very simple function stack here we are simply querying records from our user table and returning the response so we can go ahead and run and debug this and you can see as expected we are returned our results now let's say I want to actually make a change to this query now before the way that this would work would be that your run and debug panel would close and then we could go into the query and we could make our change but that is no longer the case now when we run in debug let's say I want to go ahead and make a change to this query I want to return all users that are named Chris when I click on this query you can see that the run and debug panel is now sticky so this persists which allows us to quickly make our change so let's go ahead and say I want all users named Chris and we can save our changes and we can just click rerun and we have our new results so this allows you to more quickly iterate on your function stack and test those changes not only does this enable you to do that but this also enables you to continually see the previous response while you make new changes so let's say I want to create a variable based on this result so what I can do is I can go ahead and add a create variable step and you can see that I have my run and debug result here so I no longer have to worry about either copying this or remembering the path to the data that I want so let's say I want the name of this first user and I can save this and I can re-run it again and you can see of course now in the debugger we have that uh that new variable that we just created but I didn't have to worry about remembering the pathing to get the data for this variable because we have sticky run and debug this has enabled me to build this new Step a lot faster now the next thing you might notice is next to the run and debug button we have a new button that has appeared that says three revertible changes this is part of our new draft support inside of the function stack draft support allows you to quickly roll back changes inside of your function stack and Test new versions of your function stack before actually saving those changes previously the way this worked is that changes to your function stack would be instantly live now we've enabled you to have drafts of your function stack and choose when to actually publish those changes and make them available on the live endpoint you also have the ability to revert changes so let's say I just want to go back to the original iteration of this function I can just click revert all changes and you can see we're prompted to confirm that we want to revert these changes so I can click revert and now I just have my standard query again with no changes this also means that the versions of your API if you have revision history on your Zeno plan is now much more meaningful because these versions will not populate on every change they will populate when you publish your changes so please keep that in mind when you are revising your function Stacks you will want to make sure that you publish your changes I am going to go ahead and make another change to this function stack so we can show you some additional features as part of the new draft support so you can see when I open the publish dialog box I'm given the opportunity to create a publish message which will allow me to just essentially make a note on what changes I've made before publishing this new version of the function we're also given the opportunity to publish other drafts that exist so that means that your drafts persist over time you don't have to worry about losing any of your work if you close your tab or refresh your drafts will stay and you have the opportunity no matter where you are in your workspace to go ahead and publish other drafts at the same time something else to note is the run and debug feature is actually aware of all drafts so let me show you what I mean let's go ahead and go to our library and we are going to add a new custom function I'm just going to add one step to this we are going to create a variable and I'm going to say hello is the value and that is going to be what my custom function returns I'm going to go ahead and publish this function and then we'll go back to our API and let's actually add this function to our function stack so now that I have my custom function here we can go ahead and add that to our response and we can run and debug so you can see we not only have the results of our query but the output of that function now what happens when I make a change to this function so we can go back to our library and let's go ahead and update the value of this variable so we're going to change this to goodbye and we're going to save this but we are not going to publish so now if we head back to the API you can see that there is now an indicator on this custom function that lets us know that a draft exists for this function and if we go to run and debug you can see we are given the option to include the function draft during the run which means that when we run this again we have the changes from our function applied without actually publishing them and if we want to run the original version of the function we can just uncheck this include drafts option and we can go ahead and run this again and it Returns the original response from the published version of that function so there is a ton of flexibility here in how you actually determine what changes are live and how you can actually test those our goal here is to enable you to iterate and test your function Stacks as quickly as humanly possible without actually publishing those changes to your live apis and functions until you are ready the next Improvement I would like to share with you are bulk actions and search inside of the function stack so you can see I've reverted all my changes here so let's go ahead and just add a couple of new steps to our function stack and we can show how these new features work so now I have three steps in my function stack and just to point out here we can easily grab one of these functions and drag them and reorder them however we'd like but let's say I want to select multiple at a time and maybe group these together or disable them I can hold shift and I can drag to select multiple steps of my function stack and you can see then we have a few options here to group disable or delete so if we click disable and they will not run when we test this function I can go ahead and select them again and if I want to group these together you can see I now have a group and these groups are now collapsible which means I can just collapse them so I don't see the steps until I want to this is really helpful if your function Stacks get very long and you want to just make it a little bit easier to understand what's happening visually you now have the ability to collapse groups let's say I want to actually ungroup this I can click the three dots on the right right hand side and just click ungroup and now my function stack is back to normal now let's talk about search let's say I want to find all of the functions that reference VAR 2. I can just go to my search box and I can type in VAR underscore 2 and you can see that step is now highlighted for me maybe I have multiple variables that all begin with a specific prefix and that prefix is VAR so if I just type in VAR you can see both of those steps are highlighted this is here for you to more quickly navigate through your existing function stacks the next feature set I'm going to talk about is team collaboration in Zano this is a massive update that enables you to work more efficiently with your team inside of your xano workspace just like a Google doc so you can see I'm here on my dashboard and on the left hand side we actually have an indicator that says users and it has the number of users that are currently present in this workspace when we click on this the collaboration panel opens and it shows us both of the users that are now currently present in this workspace and we are given the option to chat in real time inside of the xano workspace now this is not meant to replace any communications platform that you and your team uses but it does make it easier for you to securely chat right inside Zano we can go ahead and test this and let's just type in a message that says hello and you can see that we have that message in our collaboration box and if we actually go back to the other Tab and we open that same collaboration window we can see that message is there and let's go ahead and send a reply that just says hello back and let's go to the other Tab and you can see not only are we notified in the panel but with a notification on the lower left hand corner also in the collaboration panel is an option for you to quickly navigate to where your other users are inside of your workspace so right now we are on the dashboard in this tab but we are still on this user endpoint in the other tab so if I go back to the dashboard Tab and I go to my collaboration panel you can see we have this path option so I can just click on this and were brought right to that user endpoint up next to the run and debug button we have the user presence announced here as well so this tells us all of the users that are present on this page we can click on this to quickly open the collaboration panel or just get a more extensive list of all of the users that are on this page currently this announced presence is also available on each function stack element so if we click on this first function here and we head back to our other tab you can see on the upper right hand corner of this function the initials are placed here of the user that is editing this function now if I as the user in this tab want to also edit this function let me show you what happens so when I click on this we have a notification in the lower left that says this function is already being modified and we can request access so let's actually click request access and then we'll head back over to the other Tab and you can see that there is a request for this other user to edit this same function so we can grant access to this and you can see that we've been removed from editing that function so then we have the ability now in the first tab to make any changes that we'd like this means that you don't have to worry about overwriting changes that someone else has made on the function that they are currently working on I'm going to place these tabs side by side so I can show you another really awesome team collaboration feature and that is real time Updates this is also for all of you that like to work in multiple tabs in Zano you're going to love this so on the left hand side and the right hand side we have the same API endpoint open now what happens if I make a change to this API endpoint let's take our query all records and we'll just drag this down to the bottom of the function stack you can see this is also updated on the right hand side we did not have to refresh this page the updates just populate immediately let's go ahead and add an input on the left hand side here is my test input and you can see that has populated on the right hand side if I go to the right hand side and I delete this input you can see that across our other open tab this also will give you a better view of the access control so we want to make sure that we're not overwriting something that this tab on the left is doing in this create variable step so we can see the initials have populated on that step and if we click on it we can request access and then we can grant access from the other Tab and now we can edit this create variable step on the right hand side all of these features are here to enable you to work more quickly and more efficiently and truly collaboratively inside of your function Stacks with your entire team those are all of the updates that are coming to you in this function stack version 2 update again we have greatly improved the user interface and user experience inside of the no code API Builder we have enabled persistent run and debug which allows you to more quickly iterate and test your function stacks and we have greatly improved on team collaboration in Zano including multi-tab and real-time update support as well as Global and real-time presence of all of your users inside of the workspace we're super excited for you to try out all of these new features and to hear about how you're able to build more efficiently inside Xeno we are very much open to feedback on these new improvements all of these features are powered by your suggestions so please let us know what you think and let us know what you would like to see in the future this is just a small part of much larger overall updates to make Zano easier and faster and more powerful thank you so much for watching we look forward to hearing from you and we will see you in the next one

Channel: Xano

Views: 4,239

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Id: Yh5dHwysbkg

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 09 2023