Tips and tutorials

Video tour: Lookup fields and master/detail pages

Lookup fields (also called foreign keys) allow you to include data from a field in another field. For example, if you have a table that show a listing of books, and another table listing book categories, you can create a lookup field in the books table that lists the categories stored in the categories table. Lookups are a very powerful tool for data integrity and creating one-to-many relationships. Watch the video and learn how AppGini makes this very easy.

Integrate PayPal links into your AppGini application


This tutorial will show you how to place paypal links into a table view generated by AppGini. Let's say that we have a table listing items for sale, like this one below.



We'll make some simple modifications so that it becomes like this:

Customizing the data displayed in the table view


Sometimes you may need to change the way data in one of your tables is displayed to users. Imagine this scenario: You have a rating field in one of your tables that takes a value between 1 and 5. Instead of displaying the rating, you want to show stars. Here is a screen shot of the table view showing the original data:

Default formatting of the table view fields.

Quickly backup and restore your MySQL/MariaDB database


It's very important that you have a backup plan of your MySQL database. Loosing even a single day's worth of data can be frustrating and critical to your business. If you have shell (command-line) access to your database server, here is a very easy and quick backup method: Use mysqldump.

Creating the backup

To create the dump, use this command from your shell/command-line: 

mysqldump -uusername -ppassword -–default-character-set=utf8 -N database > backup.sql

Import your existing MySQL/MariaDB database schema to AppGini

If you already have one or more existing MySQL (or MariaDB) databases, you can easily work with them in AppGini. The steps are explained below, but here is a quick TLDR-style overview:

  1. Download the latest version of our MySQL2AppGini conversion tool (m2a.zip).
  2. Unzip the downloaded file (m2a.php) and copy/upload to your server.
  3. Use your browser to navigate to the extracted file and follow the steps from there.

Detailed instructions follow below.

Formatting a field as a phone number


Q: I need to automatically format data in a field as a phone number like XXX-XX-XXXX. How can I do so?

Tweeting from your AppGini-generated web application

The tweeting method explained here is obsolete and no longer works with Twitter. We'll be updating this page soon. Please accept our deep apologies for any inconvenience caused by this.

Download free open source web applications


All the applications listed here are MIT-licensed free open source web applications generated by AppGini. You can easily customize them by editing the source code, or by editing the accompanying project files in AppGini (both the trial and full version of AppGini can be used).

Creating customized search forms


This tutorial shows you how to create a customized search form that users can use to search a particular table in your AppGini-generated web application. This search form we'll create would replace the standard filters page for the concerned table.

Automatically calculated fields


Note: This tutorial applies to AppGini versions prior to 4.50. For similar modifications applicable to AppGini 4.50 and higher, please use hooks. Please see the documentation and examples of the tablename_before_insert and tablename_before_update hooks.


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