Tips and tutorials

Creating an auto-updating balance field


In the Online Inventory Management application, the items table has a balance column (see the screenshot below) that keeps track of the current inventory balance for each item. It gets updated automatically whenever a transaction is made. Outgoing transactions decrease the item balance, while incoming transaction increase it.

Installing a local testing environment (xampp)



You can test your AppGini-generated web applications on a local machine before deploying them online. To do so, you need to install a web server, MySQL, and PHP. Of course, installing and configuring all of these programs is a lot of headache. Fortunately, there is an easier way: download and install Xampp, a single download that takes care of all the necessary work in one shot.

Note: All of the above tools are free and open source software.

Limiting user input to pre-defined options in AppGini

Some data fields in your application might allow users to select among only a limited set of options. We can set up fields this way using "option lists" ... Let's see how AppGini makes this possible in a few simple steps.

Video tour: Changing your application theme

In this screencast, we'll learn how to change the application theme. As of AppGini 5.20, you can choose a Bootstrap 3 based theme for your generated application. AppGini comes with 12 themes. All of them are responsive, meaning that they automatically look great on any screen size.

Video tour: Adding a file upload field

This is a screencast that will show you how to create fields to upload documents (or other files) in your AppGini application.

Modifying the SQL query of the table view using hooks



Sometimes, you need to change the data format of one or more fields in the table view. To do so, you need to edit the SQL query used to display the table view. However, you won't find this query if you search your AppGini application code! Instead, this query is constructed from an associative array coded into the generated "tablename_view.php" file (where tablename is the name of the concerned table).

Cascading drop downs (or filtering contents of a drop down when selecting a value from another drop down)

Cascading drop-downs link two listings to each other so that selecting a value from the first list, automatically filters the data in the second one.

RUView -- Resource Utilization Viewer

This application is shared on GitHub. Feel free to fork, enhance or just watch!

Applying a default filter on a table

In many scenarios, you may find it useful to apply an initial filter on one or more of your application tables. This is very easy to achieve using the tablename_init hook. The idea is to check whether your table has any filters applied to it, and if none is applied, apply the default filter. This way, your application users will see a pre-filtered list of records, and they can then change the filter(s) later.

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