How to Build an App with No-Code

1.   Prepare your Workplace

Sign up on Clappia and you should see an option to create a Workplace. You can give your company name or your own preference as a name for the workplace. A Workplace provides a virtual boundary to your organization so that admins can have an organization-level user and data access control.

2. Start building the application

Click on the plus button to start creating your app.

a) Familiarize yourself with the App Designer

After clicking on the plus button, you will land on the ‘Design App’ page where you can create or edit your app. You can have multiple sections in an app by clicking on ‘Add Section’.

Once you add your first section, you can then click on the ‘Add Field’ button to add fields to your app for capturing information. There are pre-coded blocks that help to build your app interface.

b) Configuring your fields for Data Capture

For every field that you add to your app, you can configure it on the right-hand panel that appears once you click on a field. There are basic and advanced options you can use to configure.

c) Add logic and calculations to your app

You can perform calculations in your app as well as add logic to it. For this, you do not need any coding knowledge. You can use the ‘Calculations & Logic’ Block for this. Just like spreadsheets, you can perform similar calculations and logic but in place of cell numbers, we use variable names to perform them. This can be called out by typing in @ followed by a field name. You can also see these variable names at the top of every field in brackets once you have saved them.

d) Get data from other Clappia apps or from your existing data sources through APIs

Getting into some advanced features is the ‘Get Data from Other Apps’ and the ‘Get Data from Rest APIs’ block. With the ‘Get Data from Other Apps’ block, you will be able to search and pull data from other Clappia apps that you have created in your workplace.With the ‘Get Data from Rest APIs’ block, you will be able to pull data from external sources like SAP, Oracle and many more sources.

3.   Additional configurations

There are some more configurations that you can use to enhance the capabilities of your app.

App Icon: Select your icon and its colour with the existing options available or you can upload your own icon for your app.

Status: Add statuses like Approved, Rejected, In Progress etc. These will be reflected in your submissions under the status field. App Admins and users with relevant access to the app can change the status of each submission. These status changes can act as triggers for different kinds of workflows.

Print Settings: Configure print templates to create PDF files. You can insert texts, images, tables or also autofill by calling out variables of the fields in your app. These PDFs can be sent to your users based on the requirement.

Google Sheets/Drive: Connect a Google Sheet/Drive from your Google account so that your data flows into the drive/sheets in real-time after every submission.

App Publish: By default, this option will be enabled. If you do not want other users who have access to the app to view the app, you can have it disabled.

Clone App: Creates a duplicate copy of your app. You can give a name to the cloned app and select which workplace to clone it to if you have multiple workplaces. Submissions will not be copied when cloning an app.

4.   Configure workflows and automate your app

Every requirement is different. To set your app flow, you can add several combinations of different workflow nodes available. For example, you can use the ‘Wait’ node to wait a certain amount of time and then add an ‘Email’ node to send out notifications via email for every submission made. Each workflow node can be configured and you can call all the variables of your app just by typing ‘@‘ here as well.

5.   Configure Dashboards

Create a live dashboard for analysis. You can create charts based on your submissions to analyse data or have automated reports that can be sent to you or users’ emails.

6.   Distribute your App to others

Your application is ready to be used the instant you create it. You can give access to this app to multiple users for them to use it.

‍User Access: Add users by typing their email id or by bulk uploading so that only they can access the apps and set the permissions for how they can use the app for each of them. The users that you add need to sign up on Clappia and visit your Workplace to find the app on their dashboard.

‍Link Sharing: Make your application public so that anyone with the link can access the app like a form and start using it without installing the Clappia app.

‍Embed on a Website: You can embed the app on your website.
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Mobile Apps: Download the Android version or the iOS version of the Clappia App Launcher.
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Whitelabeled App: Request for a white-labeled app.

7.   Use your App

Any time you click on an app, you will be directed to the ‘App Home’ where your app is live and ready to use. If you have the right permissions or are the App Admin, you can at any point in time go back to the ‘Design App’ to make any edits, and those changes will be reflected in ‘App Home’. Here users can make submissions.

a) Search, edit and download data

You and your users can search, edit and download the data based on their permissions. You can use this as your MIS. There is an advanced filter system that you can use to sort through your data. You can also bulk upload data if you have it in a separate spreadsheet.

b) Access through Mobile App

You can access the app that you have created on your mobile. Download the Clappia App from either Playstore or Appstore, and the instant you create your app, it will be ready to use on the mobile version as well.