Getting Started Guide: Building Your Education App

Discover the next steps you can take after installing one of our Education sample apps to customize and optimize your app for your specific needs.

Congratulations on installing one of our Education sample apps! Now that you've taken this first step, it's time to start customizing and building out your app to meet your specific needs.

Let's explore some steps to guide you in customizing your app. 🚀

• Change the App Name to Your Preference

• Delete Sample Records Before Importing Your Data

• Edit the Tables & Fields

• Connect Your Tables

• Add New Fields & Tables

• Customize Your User Roles

• Import Your Data

• Customize Your Pages

• Decipher What Pages Require a Login and Tailor Your User Permissions

• Live App Design

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Change the App Name to Your Preference

After installing one of our sample apps, you will find yourself in the Builder, ready to customize the app to suit your needs. However, many users have expressed feeling unsure of where to start, which can be overwhelming.

An easy starting point is to personalize the app's name to align with your preferences. There are two ways to change the app's name:

• Navigate to the top left of the Builder and click on the app's name.

• Select "Settings" from the left menu and edit your app's name from there.

 

Delete Sample Records Before Importing Your Data

Example records are included in the sample app when it is installed. Before importing all of your institution's data, it's best practice to delete these records. 

To bulk delete the sample records, head to each table, and in the Records view, select "Delete" and then "Delete All Records":

Edit the Tables & Fields

There will very likely be a need for you to edit the default fields that come with the sample app. Knowing what data you have to import into Knack, you can begin by deleting and adding the necessary tables and fields required for your institution's needs. 

To learn how to manage your tables and fields, including adding, deleting, and editing their settings, see the following articles:

 

Connect Your Tables

Chances are, in your specific scenario, establishing connections between tables will be necessary to link and organize your records effectively. 

For instance, you might have a Courses table that will contain records on every course your institution provides. You may want to link your Students user role table to connect students with the courses they are enrolled in.

To learn more about how connections are added and how they work in Knack, see the following articles in the Tables & Connections section of our Knowledge Base: Tables & Connections

Add New Fields & Tables

To customize your app to your institution's needs, there will likely need to be more fields and tables added to organize any additional data you have. 

For example, you might want to include a table to store information about extracurricular activities hosted at your institution. Adding this table and the relative fields within can be done manually or can be done while importing. 

To learn more about adding tables and fields, see our articles on Working with Tables and About Fields.

 

Customize Your User Roles

The sample apps offer suggestions for useful user roles in your app. Depending on the variety of users using your app, you may need to add more roles specific to your needs and remove any roles that are not relevant.

Import Your Data

Now to the step that makes your app most powerful- data! Importing your data has been made easy with our importing feature. 

Importing your data into the respective tables and mapping your data file's columns to existing fields, as well as mapping columns to new fields that you can create during the import process, will be a straightforward process.

 

Customize Your Pages

Customizing your pages for your Live App is where you can personalize your app users' experience and tailor it to your institution's needs. The Pages section of the Builder is crafted to streamline this process, making it simple and efficient to prepare your app for sharing with your users!

You can add additional views, customize where they are located on the page, add page rules, remove any unwanted views from your pages, create dropdown menus, and more!

 

Decipher What Pages Require a Login and Tailor Your User Permissions

You might want to create pages that require users to sign in before accessing the data, while also having some of your pages public to be viewable for all users. Additionally, it could be beneficial to have pages accessible only to specific user roles, such as only Admins having access to student grade information on one of your pages.

 

Live App Design

Before sharing your app to your user base, you can add your final touch by customizing the look and feel of your Live App by heading to Settings > Live App Design! This will allow you to make your app personable to your institution's use case and improve your user's app experience. 

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