More than a decade ago, majority of apps were being built only by professional developers as the app development platform were highly technical in nature. This meant business users were heavily dependent on IT for their apps. As the low-code/no-code wave started picking up AgilePoint spearheaded democratizing the application development landscape by empowering citizen developers to build apps on their own using its codeless architecture.
One of the core pillar of citizen-based app development is the ability to design the data layer which is inbuilt into the platform and did not need IT to deploy SQL tables for the app designers. In AgilePoint NX v7 when Data Entity was introduced, it quickly became the backbone for app development and led to further product innovations like Form Based Apps. In AgilePoint NX v8 we overhauled the look and feel of the Data Entity module for having a better user experience and we noticed that the Data Entities usage sky rocketed specially in the Citizen Develop community.
Today, as part of the series of product update videos on AgilePoint NX V9.0 release, I am delighted to unveil the Entity Diagram feature. An Entity-Relationship Diagram is a visual way to represent how the entities are related to one-another. It pictorially depicts the real-world modelling of objects and requires no technical knowledge such as SQL. A non-tech user can easily work on these to easily make required changes to the Data Entities. This continues to build on our commitment to empower non-technical users to manage application development.
Entity Diagram is available at two levels. At a global level, anyone who belongs to the Global Data Entities Permission Managers role can see the global Entity Diagram which shows all entities in the system along with their field definitions, constraints, relationships etc. At an entity level, you can see a new tab labelled Entity Diagram where you can see how the current entity is related to other entities in the system. It allows users to visually to add/edit fields and relationships amongst entities. Other features include ability to export the entire Entity Diagram canvas either as a PDF file or as an image.
Note: Please note that this video is recorded while this feature is in beta version. Some of the labels and icons might change by the time it goes GA but the general concept of configuring these activities would remain the same.