Building your App in Studio
To build an app, you work in different areas within Studio that help you customize it, set its business logic and test it. To learn more about each step of the app building process and the entities involved in it, refer to the sections below.
Create your App
With Studio, you can create two types of applications: mobile or web. If you need to create a mobile app, you can do it from scratch or from a template. However, you can create a web app only from scratch. The creation of an app starts in the dashboard's Apps tab.
Also, you can create mobile apps to connect to and interact with smart POS devices. To learn about this integration in detail, refer to the SmartPos documentation.
As an example, to give a thorough overview, we cover the elements you need to customize when building a mobile app from scratch.
Important
Before building an app from scratch, create your theme first, if it is not already created in Studio. This way, you can create an app and apply the theme right away.
Arrange your App Elements
You can build and customize your app using the many elements available in Studio, such as themes, assets, layouts, and site views. Arrange all these elements before you start building your app.
Once you have selected the branch you want to work on, make sure to customize your app's theme. The theme defines the look and feel of your app, including colors, sizes, fonts, backgrounds and other elements of the app and its components. If you use a theme that is already created in Studio, edit it as necessary to adapt it to your app's needs.
After editing your theme, you can upload the assets (images, icons, fonts, video files, audio files or widgets) you are using to build your screens.
Build your App in the Screens Editor
The Screens Editor is a low-code tool that consists of a canvas to build and design your screens. Additionally, you can add assets, drag and drop components and customize these elements using the attributes editor. The canvas also shows a preview of how your app screens will look like when deployed.
Apply Business Logic
Invoke processes from your app’s components to add business logic and rules to its functionality. Depending on the complexity of the logic you want to apply, you might need to create other elements too.
If you need to build simple business logic, call app's internal elements such as call APIs or add functionality to the front-end of your app, like animating a screen and its components, you invoke processes.
If you need to add complex business logic by calling external or internal services or consuming databases, you need to create transactions.
Additionally, you can test your app's logic and flow as you build with any of the following methods:
Use Run Transaction to test your transactions and see if there are any missing connections.
Use the lambdas editor to test your lambda processes.
Run unit tests with the Quality Assurance tool.
Use App Flow to see a diagram of how your screens are connected and the processes and transactions involved in them.
Speed up the Building Process
You can build your apps faster by reusing already-built modules and extensions of the Veritran platform.
Modules are configuration units that can be reused through interfaces in your app. Instance and reuse component and screen type interfaces to add a specific functionality to your app, or a whole screen flow.
You can also subscribe to extensions in Marketplace and use those extensions to provide a complete user experience to your app or to easily solve different business functionalities.
Publish and Test your App
Once you have finished creating or editing your app, you can publish its current configuration to test it using the Generate & Publish feature. You may also use the Quick publish option to test the changes applied to an entity without generating and publishing the entire app.
Note
To use the Quick publish option, you must have previously generated and published your app at least once and selected a target.
If your app was already deployed and is installed in your device, you can analyze and debug it using Devtools. This tool helps identify issues within your app that you can then fix within Studio.