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Build Your Live Application

Lesley Updated by Lesley

Knack is a great place to store all of your data in a powerful online database. The problem is your data isn’t doing any good just sitting there. The next step is to unlock that data so it’s useful in building your business.

This happens in the live application, or live app, where Knack gives you easy tools to share, analyze, and manage your data.

What is the Live App?

Think of the Live App as a website designed for your users to interact with the data you share with them.

Any website will have several pages like a home page and contact page, and each page will have different elements like forms, images, and navigation menus.

Your database application is made up of similar pages. For example, your user may begin on a page that lists all of the customers that are stored in your database:

They can click on a specific customer to view the orders that customer made as well as a form to add a new order:

In this example, there are two pages, the home page with the list of customers, and the child page with the specific customer and their orders.

The grids and forms are what we call views- visual elements that can display or update the records in your database. Knack comes with the perfect library of flexible views to build your application:

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Check out this guide for ideas and inspiration for your Live App. 

Add Pages

You manage your live application in the "Pages" section of your builder:

Click the green plus button next to "All Pages’", or the "Add a New Page" button on the screen, choose whether the page will be Public, Protected by a Login, or create a Dropdown Menu:

Add Views

Add your first view by clicking on the "Add View" button from the top bar:

This will present you with the option to choose the view type that you would like to add to your live app pages on the left side of the screen:

Knack automatically uses your database to give you the right view options based on the connections you’ve added.

For example, on a customer page, you’ll have options to add views to create a new order connected to the customer or list the orders connected to the customer. This is because a connection was created to link customers with orders in the database.

View Options

Each view comes loaded with options to configure it exactly as you need. To edit your views, hover over a view, and click on the pencil icon to edit it:

For example, you can configure an orders grid to only show a few fields, to include a keyword search, to show running order totals at the bottom, and to highlight pending orders with a special icon.

Much like a website where the pages are linked together, you can add links and menus to your live application to navigate through multiple pages.

All the start pages are grouped into a pages menu at the top of your application:

Links can be added to views to navigate to child pages to view more details:

And menus can be added to organize your views into multiple pages:

Up next, learn how to View and Share Your App.

You can find the full documentation on Knack in our Builder Guide, here.

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View and Share Your App

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