EDUC 2024
Post regarding DataFlex v. 25, Navigation Designer
Many many good things were presented at this year’s EDUC conference in Croatia, but the most significant (for me) was the upcoming DataFlex version 25.0.
The “navigation designer” in particular will change our lives. It’s a drag ‘n drop UI for building drill-down apps and it represents a radical improvement over existing ways of building webapps. Not least for new developers that can “get on with it” right away and then learn the intricacies of navigation and data dictionaries on the way.
Once you have the database you can set up the entire application navigation logic within a few minutes. That’s all zooms and selects and header-detail views created plus the navigation between them! That’s fantastic. The task that remains is to open every one of them to make it look and behave exactly how you want. But the navigational part of the app will already be in place.
From a blank workspace with the order-entry database installed a functioning prototype of a webapp was produced in less than 5 minutes. Harm did just that during a presentation during which the attached image below was taken. You can just about track all possible navigation paths emerging from the ‘oFlextronDashboard’ view. What a tool!
Of course, the “navigation designer” also gives a sublime overview of existing drilldown apps and it lets you open any view source instantly by double-clicking the entity.
This was just one item from the conference. There were of course a lot more 🙂
Written by: Sture Brøgger Andersen, Owner and Senior Developer, Sture ApS