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About Your Live App

Ro Chittick Updated by Ro Chittick

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

The Pages section of the Knack builder is where you add visual elements, or Views, for your live app to work with your records: 

Views are collected onto Pages. Your users will begin on a start page and can navigate to other pages in order to access different views. Each page can have one or more views.

A view is a visual element that works with records in your database. These include:

  • Forms to add and update records
  • Tables, Lists, Maps, and Calendars to display multiple records
  • Searches to find specific records
  • Details to view a specific record
  • Reports to view summaries and calculations of multiple records
  • Menus to link to other pages
  • Rich Text views to display static content in your interface, like images and rich text

Pages

Your app starts with a single "Home" page, but you can add multiple pages to your Knack app. To add pages to your live app, click the green "+" button in the left column of the Pages section of the Builder, next to All Pages:

You can view a preview of your live app pages with either live data or sample data by clicking on the dropdown arrow next to Live Data:

You can also view your pages in your live app by clicking on the ‘Live App’ button:

Once you add a new page, you can begin adding views to your pages.

Click here for more information on adding and editing pages in your app.

Views

Your interface begins with an empty start page. This is the first thing your users will see:

You will have to add views to your app pages so that your users can view data when accessing your app. For example, this page contains two tables, one to view Contacts, and another to view Proposal Stages:

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

When you click the Add View button, you will be given the option to pick a view type on the left side of the page:

Once you select the kind of view you would like added to your live app page, you will need to select which object that view will work with:

Once added, you will be directed to that view’s settings so that you can customize your view:

Click here for more information on adding and editing views.

Now that you've added pages and views to your Knack app, you will need to create ways for your users to navigate between your app pages. Menus and Links are used to navigate between different pages in your app. Understanding how menus and links work is important for building a complex app of more than one page:

  1. At the top is a Page Menu. This is a special menu that will display a link to each parent page, like your "Dashboard" page. You can control options for this menu by clicking the "Settings" icon link in the very top menu of your builder, then selecting the "Layout & Colors" tab.
  2. Directly above the table is a link to "Add Note." This is a Menu View linking to a child page. On that page is a form to add a new company record.
  3. In the table, itself is an Action Link Field to "view more details." Each of these links goes to a child page that displays more details about a specific company record. This is useful if you don't want to show every field as a table column, or show records connected to the company (see below).

Adding User Logins

Now that you have your pages and views set up, you may want to control who can view your app pages. If you have User Logins enabled, you can add logins to your app by clicking on the ellipses next to your page’s name, and selecting ‘Require Login’ from the dropdown menu:

This means a user must log in before they can access any page:

Click here for more information on logins and registrations.

More Options

Showing Connected Records

With Knack, you can easily connect records. For example, you can set up your database so each Contact record is connected to a Company record.

Once you’ve connected your records, you can easily display them in your pages and views. For example, you may want to show all the Contacts connected to a specific Company:

Just click to add a view on any details or edit page and Knack will present you with options to show the connected records:

Knack knows that Contacts are connected to Companies, so you have the option of displaying those connected records with a view.

Click here to learn more about connecting records in views.

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