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, where Knack gives you easy tools to share, analyze, and manage your data.
What is a live application?
Think of a live application like 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 or 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 tables 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:
Add pages
You manage your live application in the "Pages" tab of your builder.
Click the "add page" button and follow the step-by-step instructions for adding your first page, selecting the views you want to include:
Add Views
Views are automatically added using the "add page" wizard, but you can also add additional views using the options in the page toolbar. Just click or drag on one of the view options available for that page:
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.
For example, you can configure an orders table 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.
Click on the view to open it in edit mode and use the tabs on the left to configure different options.
Link pages together
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:
You can add a menu view from the pages toolbar or choose to link new views with a menu when you add them:
Up next, learn how to View and Share Your App.
You can find the full documentation on Knack in our Builder Guide, here.