In the previous chapter, ‘How to Connect the Xero API to Appsmith’ we created an Appsmith application which connected to your Xero account through the oAuth API and displayed a list of invoices on a table. In this chapter, we’re going to extend that application further by adding actions to enable the user to approve an invoice. The previous chapter is available here in the news and resources section of the Tick 9 website.

Requesting New Permissions

Up to now, we created a read-only Xero application, however in this chapter we’ll be writing changes back to your Xero account. So, we’ll need to request additional permissions from Xero.

Under ‘Datasources’ on the left-hand side of Appsmith, click on your Xero API connection and press the ‘Edit’ button on the top-right. In the ‘Scopes’ field, simply update the value with the below:

openid,

accounting.transactions,

profile,

offline_access,

accounting.contacts.read,

email

Then, click on the “Save and Re-Authorize” button to reauthorize with Xero with the additional permissions enabled.

Cleaning Up

If you’re following from the previous chapter, when you bind an array of objects to a table, it will by default, display every field from the objects in the array. So let’s clean this table by hiding the columns we no longer need.

In the ‘Edit’ mode, click on the table on the page, and under ‘Columns’ press the button on the far right to hide columns you don’t need.

Now you’ve tidied up the columns, do you want to display every invoice, or only the invoices which are awaiting approval? If you require the invoices only needing approval, go over to the getInvoices query, select the Params , create a new row with the name Statuses with the value DRAFT,SUBMITTED . Once you re-run the query you will find that the table will show only the invoices which require approval.

Creating an Action Menu

Whilst selecting the table, on the right hand side, go to the bottom of the ‘Columns’ list and click on ‘Add a New Column’. Then, under the ‘Column Type’ menu, select the item ‘Menu Button’.

On our menu, the user will have a choice of two actions, ‘Authorize’ which will set the status of the invoice as ‘AUTHORIzED’ in Xero, and ‘View Line Items’ which will open a dialog for the user to view the individual line items of the selected invoice.

You may choose the customise your menu item further by setting an icon, background and text colours.

Viewing Line Items

Next up, let’s create the dialog which will appear when the user clicks on the ‘View Line Items’, go back to the ‘Widgets’ section on the left hand side and drag-and-drop a ‘modal’ widget and give it a name (e.g lineItemsDialog). Then, within the same modal, drop a ‘table’ widget inside of it. Once placed comfortably within the dialog, bind the table to the following data source {{invoiceTable.selectedRow.LineItems}} . This will now display the list of line items on the table.

Now, let’s make the dialog open when we click the menu option, go back to your main table widget on the page and find the menu column you just created. Go to the ‘View Line Items’ menu option, under the onItemClick menu option, select Show modal and then click on the dialog you created (e.g lineItemsDialog).

Great, deploy your application and try out the dialog you just created.

Approving an Invoice

Let’s now connect up the ‘Authorize Invoice’ button to an API action, so when you click on the button, it will send the request to the Xero API to change the status of the invoice to the ‘AUTHORIzED‘ type.

On the left-hand side, click on ‘Add Query/JS’ and select on ‘New Xero Query’. Set the name approveInvoice and set POST as the HTTP action. In the URL field, we want to bind the selected Invoice ID to the query – so paste the following:

https://api.xero.com/api.xro/2.0/Invoices/{{invoiceTable.selectedRow.InvoiceID}}

Then we need to apply the same standard headers to inform Xero of the organization, and the type of data we’re sending/receiving.

Next, click on the ‘Body’ tab, select the ‘JSON’ switch and paste the below JSON body. This will provide Xero with the fields which we’re changing, in our case, the status of the invoice.

{ "Status": "AUTHORIZED"}

Then, click on the ‘Settings’ tab and enable ‘Request confirmation before running API’ – this will prevent accidental approval of invoices, by confirming with the user before committing to the action.

Finally we need to wire up the button on the table menu to the API action. Return to your page, select on the table and find your ‘Action’ column. In the ‘Authorize’ menu option, click on the JS button alongside the onItemClick label and paste the below JavaScript.

{    {        approveInvoice.run(            () => {                showAlert('Great, your invoice was approved!', 'success');                getInvoices.run();            },            () => {                showAlert('Oops! An error occured. Please check your API connection and try again.', 'error');            }        )    }}

Let’s break-down what this code snippet is doing. When the user clicks on the menu button, it will run the approveInvoice query. In the first argument, the code is executed when the request was successful, so we’ll display a notification to the user informing them of the successful action, and then refresh the getInvoices query. The second argument will execute on failure, in this case, display a notification to the user that an error has occurred and that they may want to try again.

Great, that’s it! If everything has gone to plan, you should be able to deploy the application, click on the menu and approve an invoice on the table.

Thank you for reading! If you’ve got any questions, or have an issue following this guide, then please don’t hesitate to reach out by emailing luke@tick9.co.uk.

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In this guide – we’ll walk you through connecting your Xero account to Appsmith to create an application around its data.

Setting up Appsmith

Appsmith can be downloaded and hosted within your local business network. But this guide won’t cover the installation process; if you want to try Appsmith, you can use the cloud service provided by Appsmith or speak with a member of our team for advice on installing Appsmith within your local network.

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Open Appsmith, create a new application called “Xero – Invoices,” and click “Build with drag & drop.” You’ll see an empty page with “Drag and drop a widget here.” We now need to connect Appsmith to your Xero API account.

Step 2) Setting Up the Data Source

On the left-hand side of Appsmith – you’ll find a toolbar combining “Widgets,” “Queries/JavaScript,” and “Data Sources.” Let’s start by connecting to your business account on Xero through the Xero API.

Click on the plus button to the right of “Datasources” and then select “Authenticated Account”. Appsmith will now create a new REST API datasource within your application. But before using it, we need to configure the datasource to communicate with Xero’s OAuth Authentication correctly.

1. In the URL field, paste the base address of Xero’s API (https://api.xero.com/).
2. Click on the Authentication Type dropdown, and select OAuth 2.0.
3. Scroll down to Grant Type and select Authorization Code.
4. Within the Access, Token URL field, paste the followinghttps://identity.xero.com/connect/token.
5. We now need to provide the scope of our API access. In this guide, we’ll need to access our organization's contacts and accounting data. So paste the following values into the field OpenID, offline_access, accounting.transactions.read,profile,accounting.contacts.read,email.
6. Within the Authorization URL, paste the following https://login.xero.com/identity/connect/authorize.

In order to get our Client ID and Client Secret – we need to make a quick diversion to Xero. Head over to the following link and click on the blue “New App” button once logged in. Give your application a name (e.g., Northwinds Appsmith), and then paste your generated “Redirect URL” from Appsmith into the box at the bottom.

Once created, go into the registered application and select “Configuration” on the left-hand side. Take note of the Client ID and Client Secret (if you don’t have one, click on the generation button). Now return to Appsmith and paste these values into the respective fields.

We should now be ready to authorize your access with Xero. Simply click on the “Save and Authorize” button at the bottom of the page and wait a few moments until you’re redirected to Xero (as shown in the screenshot above). Select the organization you want to grant access to, and click “Allow access.” You’ll then be taken back to Appsmith.

Step 3) Selecting Your Organization

Now you’ve successfully connected Xero to Appsmith – we can retrieve data from your Xero account. Let’s begin by getting the information of organizations from your Xero account.

On the left-hand side of Appsmith – click on your data source (e.g. Xero API) and click on New API +. You’ll now be taken to Appsmith’s query editor for REST APIs. In the URL bar, type in /connections after the URL. Appsmith will automatically handle the oAuth 2.0 authentication in the background and populate the request with the required headers. Once you click the Run button, you’ll see the JSON response from your request at the bottom of the page. It should contain an array of objects listing the Xero organizations you’ve granted access to.

Let’s now create a drop-down list on your application so that your users can select the organization which they want to view data from. On the left-hand side, under “Pages” select on the first page (e.g Page1) and then click on Widgets .

Click on your widget, and within the Options code block we need to bind the values from our API response to the Select widget. Some JavaScript code may have already been populated, which creates an array of items with two values for the widget, a label value to be displayed to the user and the value which should be the ID of the organization. Paste, or enter the below code into the Options block.

{{getTenants.data.map( (obj) =>{ return  {'label': obj.tenantName, 'value': obj.tenantId } })}}

Before we move onto the next stage, make sure to provide the widget with a name (e.g tenantSelect – we will need to reference back to the widget in our next query!

Step 4) Getting Invoice Data

Let’s now retrieve the invoice data from your Xero account! On the left-hand side, click on your Xero datasource and click on New API+. Name the query getInvoices and press return.

In the URL bar, enter /api.xro/2.0/Invoices after the base address.

Under the Headers tab, we need to specify the organization in Xero which we want to pull back the invoices for. You’ll see two rows under this tab, under Key 1 enter Xero-tenant-id and then in Value 1 we need to bind to the selected value from the drop-down we previously placed on the page.

Enter the value

{{tenantList.selectedOptionValue}}

Next, we need to tell Xero that we want the API to respond with JSON, and not XML which is the default behaviour. To do this, simply enter Accept in the next row under the Headers tab, and enter application/json .

Now press “Run”, and if everything has gone to plan – the API would have responded with a list of invoices from your Xero account.

Step 5) Displaying Invoice Data

We’ve now created a query which retrieves invoice data from your Xero account, but let’s now create a table which will display the list of invoices.

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On your page, drag and drop a button next to the select button. In the Label field, give the name Refresh . When we click this button, we want Appsmith to execute the getInvoices query which we created in the previous stage – so under Events on the right-hand side, click on the drop-down under onClick and select getInvoices under Execute a query . Then let’s display a useful alert to the user informing them that the data has been refreshed, under onSuccess click on Show message and enter Successfully retrieved invoices from Xero .

Next, find the Table widget and place it on your page. Give the widget a useful name, such as invoiceTable . Then the right-hand side, under Table Data bind to the array of invoices from the API response by entering the following value {{getInvoices.data.Invoices}} . After a few moments, the table will display the list of invoices from your Xero account.

However, this will only display the first page of invoices from the Xero API which is limited to 100 records. In order to display all your invoices, you will have to enable server side pagination – on the right-hand side, scroll down to Server Side Pagination and make sure this switch is enabled.

Return to the getInvoices query – under the Pagination tab select on Paginate with Table Page No . And then go to the Params tab, under Key 1 enter page , and then in the value input bind to the current page of the table with the following value {{invoiceTable.pageNo}} .

Then back on the table widget, run the getInvoices query when onPageChange is triggered. Once this has been enabled you can click on the right arrows at the top of the table to navigate through all your invoices.

Next Steps

That’s it for this article! Click on the “Deploy” button at the top-right to see the the final version of your application.

In the next article, we’ll delve further into how we can modify our application to write changes back to Xero.

Day before yesterday we reached 20,000 Stars on Github. 

We’re excited by this number because of what it represents. 20,000 Stars is a milestone that puts us in the company of other exciting open source projects that we all use and love. 

It’s been a steady rise. Since our launching on Github in mid 2020, it’s taken us a little over 2 years to reach this milestone. In June last year, we wrote about our learnings while hitting 4500 Stars. Since then, we’ve gotten a 4.4x jump since. 

How did we get here?

There’s a big debate in the open source community around the value of Github Stars. One Stack Overflow question laments "GitHub Stars" is a very useful metric. But for *what*?

We look at Github Stars as an informal measure of popularity of an open source project. And so while there might exist popular projects with low Stars, projects with high Stars more often than not command some mindshare. 

So while we keep an eye on this metric, it’s definitely not something we lose sleep over. 

Our philosophy has been to focus on things that add value to developers worldwide and focus methodically initiatives that further that cause. And so here are the things we’ve been doing (with pride)

Committing (Code)

We’ve been shipping. A LOT. And it's getting noticed. The folks at OSSInsight have been tracking and ranking various open source projects. We've submitted the highest number of pull requests among all low code development platforms. What makes this more interesting (and exciting) is that the definition of a low code platform according to OSSInsight is quite broad, including companies like Hasura, Supabase, Strapi.

And Appsmith continues to lead this chart month over month. 

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Our users are noticing this too.

In addition to new users discovering us from word of mouth, we’re also seeing a lot of existing users returning back to Appsmith citing how much better the platform has gotten since they last tried it.

Even though our primary aim has been to educate our users about new features releases, bug fixes and helping users create bettet software, we started noticing that a lot of developer media began picking up our updates. This was very exciting to observe. Devops.com covered our version control, New Stack highlighted our OSS approach, JAXenter covered our JS Editor launch, and SD Times featured us not once, but twice as their Project of the Week (the second time was probably due to our fundraise). 

Retention over Acquisition

We made a conscious call in 2020 to focus on retention and user education over user acquisition. The good folks at Threado covered our early community-building efforts some time back. 

We believed as long as we served users via solving bugs, prioritizing features they asked for, and making ample content to help people get the most out of the platform, word of mouth would take care of acquisition. 

We launched our discourse community to create a Q&A type knowledgebase. In addition to helping our existing users and reducing load on our support team, it’s also becoming a growing source of organic traffic and bringing in new users (plausible data only from Apr 22) 

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To increase retention, we also created Sample Apps, and Templates to help users understand product features better. While Templates enable a user to see a fully functional application that’s ready to be forked (like a dashboard or admin panel), Sample Apps have a narrower scope to help users perform a specific functions like How to implement a Search / Filter functionality in a Table with MongoDB as a datasource. This is in addition to the videos and blogs we’ve been regularly publishing around use-cases and investing in robust documentation. We’re slowly seeing the fruits of this from a new user acquisition perspective kick in because this type of content is also great for SEO. 

Highlighting Self Hosting

One of the early calls we made was to ensure that we made it easy for people to self-host Appsmith because that's how a lot of our users preferred using the platform. This is also reflected in our outreach efforts; you might see us plugging in links to our Github repo often (more so than website). The self host option is also prominently featured on our website's “hero section”.

Communicating across channels: Feature Updates, Opinions and Engaging Developers

We've been actively answering questions and sharing our feature releases on Reddit, Twitter, HackerNews and community forums of our integration partners. None of these channels individually bring a massive spike to traffic, but instead send a steady stream of consistent traffic to us every month and brings in a lot of new users to our Github repo. Like our July updates which is being received well from the Reddit community.

Word of Mouth 

While our team continues to actively monitor and post our opinions on these platforms, increasingly we’ve started noticing that our users have started talking about us. For example, user comments on HackerNews like these make our day. All in, across Github and our website, 3rd party forums are increasingly contributing anywhere from 4-6K unique hits a month across our websites and Github. 

A lot of our users are also writers, empowered by platforms like Medium or Dev.to or Hashnode and many of them have started featuring us in tutorials or listicles. This has lead to a massive spike in traffic, and my hunch is increasingly becoming a big contributor to our star growth. 

Podcasts

For awareness, we had to be surgical. Instead of spending effort on SEO or ads, we decided to go after podcasts. Why? Laser focused target audience that resonates with the problem. Check. Organic backlinks. Check. Ample time to go deep into product, technology and how/why we’re building. Check. People who know what they’re talking about (our founders basically). Check. Till date we’ve recorded 15 podcasts (with 11 of them live) with an estimated cumulative 100K listens. All this in less than a 6 months. Check out Nikhil on JAMStack Radio or Arpit on Hanselminutes.  

Github Juice

Github is possibly the last true organic platform. We’ve benefitted immensely from Github’s organic traffic. We’re not quite sure how Github’s “trending” algorithm works, but we’ve been consistently been “trending” in a bunch of sub-topics like JavaScript, TypeScript, Projects from India. But this often ends up becoming a domino effect, where because we’ve been doing a lot of the things above, there are people who discover us and star us, which in turn makes us trend, bringing in further Stars.  

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As a parting note, this is just the start. And we can’t wait to see what the future holds and we’ve got so many exciting features we’re working on (and yes bug fixes too). We’ll keep executing and serving our users. Do try out Appsmith incase you haven’t already or share it with developers in your team. Want to get more involved? Maybe contribute to the project or better still, join us if you want to be a part of an organization that is building something meaningful for developers worldwide.

In July, we squashed 102 of the peskiest bugs and shipped 34 top requested features over and above under-the-hood performance and usability improvements. There’s a new table widget that’s so much more powerful, an Airtable integration, and cleaner Google Sheets queries with 178 commits in 22 days just for that enhancement alone! You can tell we have got our ears close to you. Keep it coming, guys. We love it all, and we are always listening.

#BigThings

The swanky new table widget

Fact: Just 25% of you tell us who you are and how you use Appsmith. We are okay with that. We respect your privacy.
‍Assertion: Our usage numbers should be 4X more.
Inference: When we say the Table widget, ever since we launched it, has been used a crazy 820,000 times by 6,840 users, we actually mean it's been used a lot more and is second only to the Button.
Takeaway: Give it more love.

Introducing the new Table widget

Everything you asked for from the table and more is packed into this massive update. Here’s three that should make you sit up.

• With inline editing, you can now forget about writing queries to edit data by cell, row, or column. You just get your data into the table and edit on the screen. We heavylift the queries, updating the database, and making sure it sticks–all behind the scenes. Clicksaver? Lifesaver? Timesaver? All three and more? We think so, too.

• You know how you have always wanted to refer to custom column names more naturally than typing customColumn1, customColumn2, and so on in your queries? Yep. Done. No matter what the name of your column, reference away just as naturally as you name them.

• Themes have been making apps pretty for a while, but Tables stayed rebelliously aloof from that prettiness. We have now made them fall in line with Themes, so if you want shades of blue and Roboto, you got it in Tables, too.

There’s a whole lot more that you are going to have to see for yourself.

Airtable integration, out in the sun

Our Airtable integration gave UI facelifts to the low-code datasource. It is now out of beta, ready for its moment in the sun.

Connect with a Airtable base in two minutes, and start building your apps without worrying about complex data workflows.

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Auto-indent here to make a dent

On our latest version? Tried the JavaScript editor yet? No? Do that now and you don’t have to read on anymore. 

Oh, okay. You are still here. Fine. We will show you.

Automatically pretty code is pretty cool, huh? More about it here.

#UpdateThings

“Hide Error Messages, Hide”

Infuriating little things, error messages, that bring up existential questions, right? And when they showed up all the time, they got us to, “Frustrating!”. They don’t anymore, only showing up when a widget is visible and clicked.

“How much to upgrade?”

Got your Appsmithing going, but a paid feature’s in your way? Fret not, self-hoster. We got your back with a command-line feature that estimates your usage in thirty seconds. Click this and all shall be revealed.

Run any Appsmith branch locally

With something like ./scripts/local_testing.sh chore/local-testing, running any branch as a FAT container is a breeze. Make sure Docker’s installed and running, port 80 is open, and you add arguments if you don’t want to run the release branch.

Errors, alerts, and logs

Two new modules, logger.js and mailer.js now store backup errors and alert you to them—helpful to get you on top of the error and aid find-and-fix.

While logger.js is on by default, mailer.js needs appsmithctl backup --error-mail to get humming.

Just two of the many, many ways we got your back(up).

Moving Google Sheets to UQI 

Google Sheets is a popular data source. We didn’t dig up numbers, but you can take out word for it. UQI stands for Unified Query Interface and affords standardization for queries. Made sense to get queries to Sheets working better and looking neater, too.

#AsAlwaysThings

If wishes were fishes, round-ups would be essays. Wishes aren’t fishes. So, head over to v1.7.9 if you closed our Release Notes in-app pop-up one of four different ways—yeah, we are fixing it—and see What Happened In July Appsmith style.

Need a new datasource connected?   ||    Discord    ||    YouTube    ||    Twitter

Airtable is a popular choice for developers who want to manage tabular data easily. While it's easy to use Airtable as a backend, it can be challenging to build a custom UI from scratch. This is where Appsmith comes in. With Appsmith's native Airtable integration, you can create dashboards, CRUD apps, and internal tools in minutes.

In this tutorial, we'll use an Airtable base to build an issue tracker. We'll start by creating a database in Airtable and then importing our data into Appsmith and building on top of it using JavaScript. 

With this application, users can:

• Connect to their Airtable base.
• Add a new bug/issue
• Update the existing issue
• View the current bugs in the management tool.

Let's jump in!

Step 1:  Getting started

Create a new Appsmith App 

First, we need to create a new application in Appsmith so we can build it out.

• Visit https://www.appsmith.com to create a new account or login in to an existing one.
• Create a new application in your preferred organization and edit it.

Connect to Airtable

Now, we need to add your Airtable datasource to the app. In this case, we will clone an existing Airtable sample to provide our data. 

• Create a new datasource by clicking ‘+’ on the Datasources tab from the entity explorer and then select Airtable.

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• Rename the datasource. Select API Key as the Authentication Type and enter your API Key in the input field. Hit Save.

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• For the database, go to https://airtable.com/shr5ZklhBlptzRX4C and click "Use this data." Alternatively, you can also fork this Airtable template database.

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• Choose a workspace and a base in the dialog box and hit 'Create Table.'
• Go to https://airtable.com/api and select the base titled 'All bugs and issues'
• In the 'Introduction' section of the documentation, copy the Base ID (highlighted in green in the picture below)

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• Select the "Bugs and issues Table" on the left pane. Copy the table name highlighted in green in the image below.

Step 2 : Set up UI for the App

Wireframe

Here is the wireframe for what we are trying to create.

Including the modal that is used to add new bugs.

Create your widgets

Using the wireframe as a guide, create the UI for the application using the drag and drop editor. Here is a suggested process.

• Choose a preferred theme from the Theme properties option in the property pane on the right.
• Add a container widget with a text widget for your app's header.
• Three (or as many as you like) stats boxes on the canvas to display essential statistics at a glance.
• A container with a text, icon button, and list widget for showing a list of all the issues.
• A container with text, button, select and list widgets for showing details of the selected issues.
• A modal with a text, icon button, and JSON form widgets for adding a new bug entry.

Step 3 : Binding data on widgets

Listing records on the List widget

The list of bugs/issues should look something like this. In order to populate the data, create a new query and bind the results to the text.
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• Create a new query from the left pane which uses the Airtable datasource you created in the first step. Rename the query to getBase and choose the Commands to be List records. We chose this command because we would like to list all the bugs and issues in our app. Enter the Base ID and Table Name you copied in the steps above. 

• Hit Run and you should see a JSON response generated which lists the records. 
• To bind this response to the list widget, we would first create a JSObject that maps the fields from the records. Create a new JSObject and paste in the following snippet.

getAirTableFields: () => {
  return getBase.data.records.map((record) => {
    let row = record.fields;
    row["id"] = record.id;
    return row;
  });
};

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• In this JSObject, we get the response from the GetBase query, map the fields, and get the id for every row in the table. 
• Bind the list with this data using  {{JSObject1.getAirTableFields()}}
• For getting the bug name and the source, bind the text widgets within the list with {{currentItem.Name}} and {{currentItem.Bug_source}} respectively.

Getting details of the selected bug

When we click on an item from the list, we should populate the view container with details of the selected issue

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• In order to get details about the selected bug on the container placed on the right, we would just use the {{List.selectedItem.attribute}} for all the details you wish to display. For example, The bug title can be displayed using {{List1.selectedItem.Name}}, for Associated features write {{List1.selectedItem.Associated_features}}, For priority write {{List1.selectedItem.Priority}}. So on and so forth. 

• For a closed/open bug field, use the ternary format to display the status. {{List1.selectedItem.Closed == '1'? "Closed": "Open"}}

• To bind the attachments for the selected bug, write {{List1.selectedItem['Attachments']}} to bind data on the list widget in the right container. 

• Just like binding the bug details, in the image widget enter {{currentItem.url}} in the property pane to display the image attached

• Use {{currentItem.filename}} and {{currentItem.type}} to display the file name and type on the text widget.

Displaying statistics on the statsboxes

These statsboxes should help display important information at a glance from this database. As the number of issues grows, this will give us a quick understanding of the status.
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• In order to populate the statsboxes with statistics, we would create a JSObject function that maps to fields and then to Priority within the same JSON response and check if the value is High, meaning the priority is set to high. What we get in the response is our desired statistic. 

highPriority: () => {
  const high = getBase.data.records.map((record) => record.fields.Priority);
  return high.filter((currentItem) => currentItem == "High").length;
};

• Bind this output in the text widget using {{JSObject1.highPriority()}}
• In the very same manner, write a function and bind the output for the number of bugs labeled open and critical. 

Adding a new Bug/Issue

When clicking the button to add an issue, a modal appears with a form that creates a new entry. It looks like this:

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• Set the Modal to open on onClick of the icon button on the top right corner of the container on the left. 

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• Populate the JSON Form with source data by pasting the following.

{
"fields": { 
    "Bug Title": "",
    "Priority": "",
    "Assigned To":"",
    "Status": "",
    "Screenshots": [
      {
        "URL": ""
      }
    ],
    "Bug Description": "",
    "Bug Source": "",
    "Features Associated": "",
    "Created by": ""
}
}

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You can customize the field configuration as per your requirement. Here’s what the JSON Form looks like https://www.loom.com/share/1087b1e8932846feaf3dd03e8b3bb780

• To insert a new record, we’ll write a new query. 
  Create a new query and name it as InsertQuery. Choose the command to be Create Records. Add in your Base ID and Table Name. For the Records, bind the form data from the JSON form for every field. 

[
  {
    "fields": {
      "Name": "{{JSONForm1.formData.fields['Bug Title']}}",
      "Priority": "{{JSONForm1.formData.fields['Priority']}}",
      "Status": "{{JSONForm1.formData.fields['Status']}}",
      "Attachments": [
        {
          "url": "{{JSONForm1.formData.fields.Screenshots[0].URL}}"
        }
      ],
      "Assigned_to": "{{JSONForm1.formData.fields['Assigned To']}}",
      "Description": "{{JSONForm1.formData.fields['Bug Description']}}",
      "Bug_source": "{{JSONForm1.formData.fields['Bug Source']}}",
      "Associated_features": "{{JSONForm1.formData.fields['Features Associated']}}",
      "Created_by": "{{JSONForm1.formData.fields['Created by']}}"
    }
  }
]

‍

• We’ll make a new JSObject function to run multiple queries when the Add Bug button is clicked in the form

addBug: async () => {
  InsertQuery.run();
  getBase.run();
  closeModal("Modal2");
};

• Now bind this function on onClick of the Add Bug button in the JSON Form.

Update fields of a bug

This query/button can help update the details of the bug. In this case, we update the priority and statuses. 
‍

‍

To update the priority and status of a selected bug, an Update Records query would be used. 

• Create a new query and rename it as updateQuery. Choose the command to be Update Records and enter your BaseID and Table Name. In the records field, paste the following to get the selectedOptionValue of the select widgets

[
    {
      "id": {{List2.selectedItem.id}},
      "fields": {  
        "Priority": {{Select1.selectedOptionValue}},
        "Status":{{Select2.selectedOptionValue}}
      }
    }
]

‍

‍

• Now, bind this query to run on onClick of the update button.

Final thoughts

And that’s it! You have your bug tracker application ready using Appsmith’s native Airtable integration 🎉

First, you created a new Appsmith application and connected it to Airtable. Then you created the UI for your app using the drag and drop tools in Appsmith. Finally, you tied the data from Airtable to the UI widgets. Your final app should look similar to this:

‍

Please use this form to contact us if you have any template requests for internal tools that you need, and we will get to work! 

If you have any questions, contact us on Discord. You can also keep up with us on Twitter and YouTube.

Today, our integration with Airtable comes out of beta and is available for everyone 🎉! You can now build custom UIs and interact with applications built on Airtable, with minimal configuration.

‍

While it is possible to use the default API interface to connect to Airtable, we wanted to make it easier for you to directly connect your Airtable account and create applications faster than ever. This new data connector introduces a number of features:

• Integration located in the “Datasources” section
• Connect to your Airtable account with either an API Key or a Bearer Token (OAuth 2.0)
• Create queries to fetch, create, retrieve, update and delete data from a datasource using the Appsmith query editor. 
• List command lets you display all the data from Airtable, and can also present data that has been filtered and sorted based on fields, records, time zones, etc. 

For details and information on how to use this new integration (with videos!), check out our Airtable documentation here. See it in action on our full tutorial here, where we build an issue tracker with Airtable as backend. As always, let us know what you think!

It's been an eventful month here at Appsmith! We raised a Series B led by Insight Partners with participation from Accel and Cannan Partners. The round will help us improve our open source project and make it easier for large companies to adopt Appsmith. We're excited to have such strong partners on board as we continue our mission to make it easy for anyone to build and deploy internal applications. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming months!

Not just that, we've shipped a lot of features over the past month, so let's go through them.

New Features

Fuzzy Search for Widgets!

With so many options, it can be tricky to find the right widget for your needs can be tricky. We've got you covered! Fuzzy Search is an easy way navigation through all of our widgets by typing in keywords or phrases that match what exactly need to be done.

For example, say you have a typo while searching a specific widget. We'll make your search experience enjoyable by showing you the right results without hassle. Or say, if you're looking to find different input widgets that can help in your data collection process, just type an idea related to data input, and we'll show you all of the widgets that are likely to be needed on this project!

‍

Easy Backup and Restore

Are you self-hosting Appsmith? Want to back up your data? Or are you recovering from an old backup? No worries! We just added two new commands that you can use from CLI that make it easy as pie.

For backup use:

appsmithctl backup

To restore use:

appsmithctl restore

Spellcheck for Rich Text Editor

The rich text editor's new superpowers will help you type quicker, with fewer errors. Yes! We've added a spell checker that enables you to catch any typos on your way no matter where you are or how busy things get. Just hit the CTRL and right-click on the typo; you should see the corrections.

Connection Pooling for MS SQL

We now introduce a connection pool for the Microsoft SQL Server (MS SQL), where we allow multiple connections per datasource (up to 5). So if five queries need to run on page load, they can all pick their connection and get executed simultaneously.

Previously, if multiple queries were to run together, they would be sequentially queued. And if the first query took a lot of time to execute, the second query would time out even before it got sent because it starved for a connection.

Generate New Page now Uses JSON Forms

The new Generate New Page feature makes it easier to customize your app! JSON forms now power the CRUD Apps, so you can change just one setting without editing individual form elements.

Product Updates

Better App Editing Experience

We know sometimes it’s hard for you to select a widget you need. We improved the experience by introducing a couple of changes:

• Focus on the first property whenever we click on the widget.
• When we add or paste a new widget, focus on the widget name. (it should be editable only if we press Space or Enter; otherwise, it will be hard to other operations like delete, copy, paste, etc.,)

Added more styles to Checkbox and Switch Widget

Checkbox and Switch Widget support more styles out of the box. The new options include text position, alignment label, and color size font style!

Added Deprecation warning to old widgets

With this update, we're adding a warning to all the widgets going out of date. If you want you're running on a self-hosted version, you can show these Deprecation messages on their widgets; just add "deprecated: true" in the config file.

Theming for CRUD Templates and JSON Form Templates

Theming is now supported for CRUD apps and JSON Forms. This will allow developers to create and customize forms more efficiently in a few clicks.

Fixed Cyclic Dependency Errors

We fixed cycles in dependency error messages when changing or updating widgets' names and other bugs that made them behave incorrectly.

Update Organization URL Slug

When the organization name is updated, the slug is not updated. This generates an outdated URL when the user clicks on an organization name from the left panel. This PR changes the following behaviors.

• The Organization slug will no longer be unique.
• Link to organization applications will be based on the organization id instead of the slug.
• The organization slug will be updated whenever there is a change in the organization name.
• All the existing organization slugs will be updated.

Collaborations, Technical Content, Videos & Tutorials

June was an excellent month for the community, with many folks collaborating on exciting new projects and maintaining their current work. We documented many user queries on our forum that will help guide future development decisions.

• These questions can be found on our Community website (community.appsmith.com) under the appsmith-support tag.
• We've done an awesome How Do I Do X Session with our engineers Trisha and Nidhi on JS Promises, onPageLoad Actions, and Prepared Statements. Watch the stream here.
• The engineers behind the scenes are constantly working on something new and exciting. They just shipped an excellent feature - Version Control with Git! Watch as they describe its function, explain how it was built with examples in no time, and most importantly, show you some cool tricks using this powerful tool yourself!"
• We've partnered with a few friends from MariaDB to build an easy-to-use reservations tool. You have to input your desired date and time, then let the system take care of everything else. Watch the stream here.

If you're curious about what we were up to, look no further and follow this link.

If you’re interested in using a database not listed on our website as an integration, please let us know by raising a PR on Github, and we will do our best to include it at the earliest opportunity.

Join our growing community on Discord, and follow us on Youtube and Twitter to stay up to date.

Telegram-Business" is a Telegram bot that connects customers to small-scale businesses. Users can either sign up to use the bot as business owners and create a catalog for their products or use it as customers looking to purchase something from businesses on the bot. It works a lot like the popular 'Whatsapp Business' platform.

In this article, I will teach you how to use Appsmith to build a product review tool for a Telegram bot. Think of this as a proof of concept of how Appsmith can help small businesses by automating some aspects of their businesses. More specifically, with this app, users can add reviews on products they've used to help others make wise decisions when purchasing, and business owners can take the feedback given to make their products more consumer-friendly.

If you want to see how I built the Telegram bot you can check this article I wrote about it here.

Prerequisites

To follow along with the article steps, you should have the following setup:

• Appsmith Account: You can create an account with Appsmith for free via this link.
• Also, be sure to read the tutorial on how to create a telegram bot via this link.

Overview of the Tool

The process starts by creating a new application on Appsmith, and designing the interface for the product review tool using the available widgets in the design area, as shown below:

This utilizes the rating widget for the star rating, the text widget to display the product description, image widget to show an image of the product, and input widget for the comment that the user may want to leave on the product as part of their review, and of course, a button widget to submit the review.

We also want users to see comments made by other people on the product, so we'll design a second portion of the interface right beneath this one, as shown below:

This portion consists of a text widget which describes the section "what others are saying", followed by the list widget, which has been emptied and contains only a text widget to display the comments by other users. It's empty at the moment so it seems bare, however, once the data kicks in it'll come to life. You can choose to add an outline to the input field to make it more visible as shown below:

Adding Datasources

We'll start by creating an API to fetch data to display on the list widget from the bot's database; which is hosted by Fauna which is a serverless database provider, that also provides us with a graphql API through which we can send queries directly to the database.

We will be querying the database via this GraphQL API from our Appsmith application. Head over to the "Queries/JS" section and choose to create a new "Blank API", and add the following details to this new API:

• Name: getProduct
• URL: graphql.fauna.com/graphql
• method: POST
• Headers:
• Authorization: Bearer
• body‍
  

Once you're done your API should look like this:

{{    JSON.stringify(        {            variables: null,            query: `                query {                    findProductByID(id: "${appsmith.URL.queryParams.product_id}")                    {                        name                        image                        description                    }                }            `        }    )}}

You will observe that in the body of this API we make use of the "findProductByID" graphql query made available to us via FaunaDB.

Inside of this query we must specify a product id, namely the product id of the product that is to be reviewed, that way we can fetch the information about the product including the product image and description, which we can then display on our interface via the image widget and text widget.

id: "${appsmith.URL.queryParams.product_id}"

That is what this line does in the query, we fetch the product id from the Context object that Appsmith provides us with.

The Context object contains a number of properties of any Appsmith application that help us store and reference information about our application, for example, the famous "store" object is a part of the context object and we can use it to store information in our application's local store. Here's a list of items available in the Appsmith context object:

You can find out more about the context object here.

Meanwhile, the item of interest for us here is the "URL" object from the context object, which holds information about our application's URL, including the hostname, and query parameters amongst other things, as shown below:

This is important to us because we will be passing in information about the product to be reviewed and the user issuing a review as query parameters to our application url, namely the "product id" and the "user id" from the bot. This will make more sense when we integrate the application with the telegram bot.

getReviews API

Next, let's add another API that will fetch all the reviews on the given product. So head to the "Queries/JS" section again and choose to create a new API this time with the following details:

• Name: getReviews
• URL: graphql.fauna.com/graphql
• method: POST
• Headers:
• Authorization: Bearer
• body

{{    JSON.stringify(        {            variables: null,            query: `                query {                    findReviewByProductID(product_id: "${appsmith.URL.queryParams.product_id}")                    {                        data {comment}                    }                }            `        }    )}}

Here we send a query to the bot's database to fetch all reviews from the "Reviews" table that are associated with the given product's id, which is also gotten from the URL query parameter as with the previous API.

send_review API

This API is what will handle the creation of new reviews which plays a vital role in our application since that's the main purpose of the application. This API unlike the rest utilizes a graphql mutation (also provided by the FaunaDB graphql API for the bot's database). Below are the details of this API:

• Name: send_review
• URL: graphql.fauna.com/graphql
• method: POST
• Headers:
• Authorization: Bearer
• body

{{    JSON.stringify(        {            variables: null,            query: `                mutation {                    createReview (data: {                        chat_id: "${appsmith.URL.queryParams.chat_id}"                        stars: "${Number(Rating1.value)}"                        comment: "${Input1.text}"                        product_id: "${appsmith.URL.queryParams.product_id}"                    })                    {                        _id                    }                }            `        }    )}}

As you can see in this mutation query, we reference the data from some of the widgets, including the rating widget, for the value of the ratings that are given. And the "input" widget, which holds the comment given by the user on the product. Also, observe that we fetch the user's telegram id (chat_id) from the URL to associate the new review with that particular user.

Connect Datasources To Widgets

Next, we must connect the APIs we've created to the interface via some of the widgets. First, off we want the user to be able to send in a review to the database once they click on the "submit review" button, so to do that, we will open up the properties of the button by clicking on the settings icon next to it, and choose an OnClick action for the button.

Head over to the submit button widget and bring up the settings pane, and under the Actions section, choose the option to Execute a query and then select thesend_review` API from the list of options shown, as shown below:

Not only do we specify an "onClick" action, but we also specify an onSuccess action, which simply brings up a modal that displays a success message, like the one shown below:

This is a simple modal with just two Text widgets, so you can create one like that and link it to the onSuccess action as I have done.

Next, we must feed data to the list under the "What others are saying" section; click on the widget to bring up the settings for the list. Under the " items" option, add the following to load the data from our getReviews API:

{{getReviews.data.data.findReviewByProductID.data}}

This will load data from the query onto the list widget as a list of JSON objects. However, we must still specify what data goes where for each list item. In our case, we must specify what data from the "current object" goes to each list item's Text widget. Recall that each list item has a "text" widget in it, so for that text widget, we will specify its "Text" property to be the following:

{{currentItem.comment}}

Lastly, we must add data to the Image widget and the Text widget that holds the product's description. For the image, we'll set the "image" property to the following:

{{getProduct.data.data.findProductByID.image}}

Here, I am calling the "getProduct" API, which we created earlier on, and fetching the data from the response of the API call. For the description text widget, we'll set the "text" property to something similar:‍

{{getProduct.data.data.findProductByID.description}}

‍Now that we are done with this, we can deploy the application and fetch the URL. So I'll click on the Deploy button to deploy the application, wait for it to load up completely, then copy the URL from the browser.

As observed, the application currently has no data in it because necessary arguments for the APIs getProduct and getReviews are not yet present, namely:

• user_id
• product_id

If you recall, these two parameters were taken from Appsmith's URL context object, which holds information about the current URL of our application - including any query parameters that may be present.

This is important because I will be passing these two arguments as query parameters to our Appsmith application.

Integrate With The Telegram Bot

This brings me to my next stop, which is to implement some logic from the bot to help users who want to leave reviews access my application.

For this, I will send a message containing the link to our Appsmith application, along with the query parameters, which would contain the "ID" of the product they want to review and their user id on telegram (chat_id) to whoever is interacting with the bot.

Note: The code snippets shown below do not show the full implementation of my telegram bot; if you want to see how I built it, kindly refer to this article.

Typically, when users come to the bot, they get multiple options when viewing products in a catalog, as shown below:

As observed I have added a last option which allows them to Add Product Review, in order to handle that I wrote a handler function that will send back a message containing the Appsmith URL with the product id and their chat_id in the URL as query parameters. Observe:‍

‍

appsmith_url = "https://app.appsmith.com/app/review-     product/review-6179715eb2db5a27f21af7e5"    product_id = data.split(';')[1]    # generate link to appsmith UI    bot.send_message(       chat_id=chat_id,       text="Kindly click on the following link to head over to        the review page "       f"{appsmith_url}?chat_id={chat_id}&product_id={product_id}"     )

The appsmith_url variable holds the URL for our deployed Appsmith application, and contains no parameters, so opening that would just display a "bare" version of the interface we designed. However, notice how i append the ?chat_id={chat_id} option along with the product_id={product_id} option to the URL before sending it.

That way the user gets a response that's customized to include their personal id and the id of the product they wish to review. As such, when they click on the URL our Appsmith APIs will be able to fetch the data they need from the context object and react accordingly. Here's what a typical response from the bot looks like:

Now when they click the link, it'll take them to the Appsmith tool we created but this time with data loaded in, as shown below:

This way, my users can also leave comments on the products, and see reviews on the product, further increasing the trust that they have in the platform and in small-scale business ventures.

I hope you enjoyed reading that!, this article has shown you how to use the Appsmith context tool as well as how to send GraphQL queries on Appsmith, via the API editor, and ultimately how to build a simple product review tool for any use case you might have.

I invite you to use what you've learned from this article to build more interesting versions of what I have built or even different tools if you wish, rest assured everything you need to fast-track your development is available to you on Appsmith.com. If you wish to see the code base for my bot you can find it on GitHub here.

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‍TL;DR: We just raised $41m in our Series B, led by new investor Insight Partners, alongside Canaan Partners, Accel, and angel investors.

Frontend and backend development for simple applications have become incredibly complicated. It feels like we are building the same things repeatedly but just using different programming languages. The world has about 20 million software developers; most have spent hours building admin panels, forms-based workflows, dashboards, or some version of a CRUD app. That's billions of hours spent building internal apps and doing a lot of repetitive and mundane work. 

My co-founders, Arpit and Nikhil, had spent many years building CRUD apps and were tired of dealing with the same problem at every company. There had to be a better way to build these apps. We decided to release an MVP to a small community that embraced Appsmith with wide-open arms. 

We started Appsmith with a simple goal: To help engineers build the best apps they can to help their teams while avoiding repetition and monotony.

‍

I am happy to announce that we've raised our Series B to deepen our commitment to that goal. 

First, the lowdown

The lead investor for Appsmith's Series B is Insight Partners, joined by existing investors Canaan Partners, Accel India, and angel investors like Abhinav Asthana (Co-founder, Postman) and Jeff Hammerbacher (Co-founder, Cloudera). Our goal was to bring investors that understood the technology landscape well and were impressed with Insight's track record of backing companies like Docker, Postman, and JFrog, many of which are also open source. As we spent more time with the Insight team, we realized they would be the right partners for us as we scale to the next level. 

And of course, a big mention to our users and community. We're only here because you decided to take your valuable time in using, giving feedback, and contributing to the core product.

‍What have we done so far? 

‍

Today, Appsmith is a robust open-source, low-code platform for building, shipping, and maintaining internal tools. Users can connect to any datasource, create UI with pre-built widgets, and deploy business-critical applications. 

‍

You can see it in action: 

‍

Our focus last year was on improving the quality and complexity of the frontend that can be built using Appsmith, a couple of examples of which is our latest theming feature or our in-built JS editor is an excellent way to code.  These are a few among the 150+ features and enhancements we shipped in 2021. 

Where do we go from here?

Over 100,000s developers have used Appsmith for personal and professional projects so far. We see over 7,000 active teams daily relying on apps built quickly on Appsmith. We developed a 3000-member strong Discord community and helped our users build over 100,000 apps. From providing rich support to writing detailed tutorials to contribute valuable integrations, our community and team are the heart and soul of Appsmith. We have loudly and proudly built Appsmith in public and honestly believe transparency and community involvement help us in the short and long term. 

Now, it's time we make it happen for dynamic apps starting with internal apps as our focus.

With this round of funding, Appsmith will build on the progress from 2021. 

Here's a five-point plan for the coming year: 

• Add more UI widgets and Data Integrations
• Simplify the coding and debugging experience
• Investing more in nurturing the community
• Build out a robust set of offerings for advanced or mid and large-sized teams 
• Improve performance of Appsmith apps

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Final words

As I mentioned before, this accomplishment wouldn't have been possible without the love, care and support from our team, community, families, and friends.

I want to thank you all again for your continuous support and assure you we don't take it for granted. 

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