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Creating Interactive Views

By now, you've built a multi-page tool that allows you to view all products and add new products to the catalog. The following tutorial walks you through building the functionality to edit a product. During this, you'll learn to:

  1. Access one widget's state from another
  2. Set up an API to update a product
  3. Execute multiple actions on a single event

Accessing properties between widgets​

To begin implementing the "Edit Product" functionality, let's configure the table properties to add an Edit button to each row. Upon clicking the Edit button, a form modal will open to allow editing the product's details in the corresponding table row.

  1. Open ProductsTable's properties.
  2. Click on ADD A NEW COLUMN under Columns.
  3. Click the ( ⚙️ ) icon to access column settings.
  4. Change the column type to Button. You may want to rename this column within the table's properties window.
  5. Label the button as Edit under button properties in the column's settings.

Now, the ProductsTable should look something like this:

There are now buttons in each row of the table, each corresponding to that row's product. Let's configure these buttons to open a modal for editing the items:

  1. Open ProductsTable's properties.
  2. Go to the button column's settings by clicking the gear ( ⚙️ ) icon beside it.
  3. Choose the action Open Modal from the onClick dropdown.
  4. Choose New Modal.
  5. Rename the new modal to EditProductModal using its properties.
  6. Rename the modal's title to Edit Product.
  7. Delete the two default buttons at the bottom of the modal, called "Reset" and "Submit". You can do this with the trash can icon at the top of each widget's properties, or by selecting the widgets and hitting the "Delete" keyboard key.
  8. Drag and drop a new Form Widget into the modal window, and delete the form's default text widget (since the modal already has our title).
  9. Rename the form's "Submit" button to EditConfirmButton.

After those steps, your new modal should look like this:

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If the modal window gets closed at any point, you can access it again in the editor by looking in the Explorer pane to the left of the screen, finding it in the Widgets tree, and clicking its name to open it back up.

Click on the Edit button of any row to ensure that the EditProductModal opens as intended. After that is working, let's populate the form with widgets! It should be built such that:

  • It looks exactly like the AddProductForm
  • Its properties are configured in the same way as that of AddProductForm

Click here if you'd like to refer back to the previous instructions for creating the AddProductForm.

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Naming:

The names of widgets inside your EditProductModal are the same as that of the names of widgets inside AddProductForm. This is valid because they both belong to different parent pages. Names only need to be unique within the page scope; a widget and an API within the same parent page can't share the same name.

Like AddProductForm, all the form-fields in EditProductModal are empty. However, to edit a product, you'll want them to be pre-filled with the values of the product that you want to update. This means that:

  • ProductNameInput should show the productName value of the triggered row.
  • MrpInput should show mrp value of the triggered row.
  • CategorySelect should show the category value of the triggered row.

Let's configure those widgets!

To set a default value of ProductNameInput:

  1. Open properties of ProductNameInput.
  2. Set Default Text to {{ProductsTable.triggeredRow.productName}}.
  3. Verify that the Evaluated Value of the property matches the corresponding value from the triggered row.

Above, you just wrote JavaScript to set the value of Default Text using data from ProductsTable.triggeredRow, which has all the column values of the row you wish to view/perform action on. By referencing productName on it, you're accessing the value of productName column. By setting Default Text to this, you're pre-filling the form with this value.

From within the form, you've accessed data of the table row via its triggeredRow property. To see the exposed properties you can access for any given widget, select the Properties section of its entry in the Widget documentation.

Finally, note that since the scope of a widget is limited to its parent page, a widget shares its properties only with other widgets, queries, and APIs defined within the same page. For example, in this case, ProductsTable.triggeredRow can be accessed only in other widgets, queries, and APIs of ProductListPage. ProductsTable.triggeredRow can't be accessed from any widget, query, or API of AddProductPage.

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Accessing data across pages:

There are two ways to access properties of a widget or results of an API/DB Query from another page:

  1. Store the data in your browser cache using the storeValue function so that it's available for accessing even when the user moves to another page in your app.
  2. Pass the data as a query param in the URL of the page you redirect the user to. This can be done using the navigateTo function.

Now set a default value for MrpInput:

  1. Open properties of MrpInput.
  2. Set Default Text to {{ProductsTable.triggeredRow.mrp}}.
  3. Verify that the Evaluated Value of the property matches the value of the current row.

And for CategorySelect:

  1. Open CategorySelect's properties.
  2. Set Default Option to {{ProductsTable.triggeredRow.category}}.
  3. Verify that the Evaluated Value of the property matches the value in the triggered row.

Great, your form should now pre-fill with the selected product's details. Try it out to make sure that everything gets filled correctly from the selected table row.

Writing your first API​

Your edit form is ready to take user input. Next, you would have to configure its Confirm button to trigger the update of the product via an API. It involves two steps:

  1. Setting up the required API.
  2. Wiring the form-submit button to initiate the API query.

In this section, you'll set up the API.

You'll use the endpoint below to update a product:

PUT https://mock-api.appsmith.com/products/:id

This is a mock API exposed by Appsmith to help you learn API basics. It doesn't require any authentication. It accepts JSON input and responds with JSON output. To set it up on your app:

  1. Navigate to ProductListPage → Datasources.
  2. Click + Create New.
  3. Choose Create new API.
  4. You'll see a Postman-like interface.
  5. Rename the API to UpdateProductApi.
  6. Set the request method to PUT.
  7. Copy-paste the below in URL https://mock-api.appsmith.com/products/{{ProductsTable.triggeredRow.id}}.
  8. Copy-paste the query below into the Body section.
  9. Run the API.
{
    "productName" : "{{ProductNameInput.text}}",
    "mrp" : "{{MrpInput.text}}",
    "category" : "{{CategorySelect.selectedOptionValue}}"
}

Click to enlarge!

By using the mustache template in the URL (step 7), you're providing the ID of the product to be updated. To build the request body, you're writing JavaScript within mustaches to provide the new values for the product details.

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A word on sharing widget properties:

Here, you are accessing widgets' properties from within an API query. This is in line with what you learned in the previous sections - that you can access properties of a widget from other widgets, APIs, and DB Queries. Regardless of where you access properties of a widget from, you use the same naming syntax to refer to the objects. That's, you would access a value by its{{<widgetname>.<property_name>}} no matter where you are in the editor.

Configuring multiple actions on UI events​

The API to update a product is ready! In this section, you'll bind the Confirm button of EditProductModal to run UpdateProductApi.

  1. Open EditProductForm's properties.
  2. Rename label to Update.
  3. Go to Events → onClick → Execute Query.
  4. Choose UpdateProductApi.
  5. Go to onSuccess.
  6. Choose Execute Query → ProductsQuery.
  7. Go to onError.
  8. Choose Show Message.
  9. Set the Message to Product update failed!.
  10. Set Type to Error.

Let's see what you did there:

  • You configured the Confirm button to run UpdateProductApi.
  • Now, you want the ProductsTable to show the updated list of products after the new product gets added successfully. For that, you set the onSuccess event of the button to execute ProductQuery; if the UpdateProductApi runs successfully, ProductQuery would be executed. Here you're following the reactive programming paradigm of Appsmith: You are triggering an auto-update of the data displayed by the ProductsTable by calling ProductsQuery.run().
  • You set the onError event of the button to show an alert message so that if UpdateProductApi returns an error, an alert message would be displayed.

Try to edit a product, and click Confirm to verify that it works - You should now see success/error notifications in the top right of the screen.

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Due to the internal configuration of the mock database and API, you might not see the changes from your PUT request reflected in the table. However, if your app returns a success message, then don't worry - you did it correctly!

Currently, the form modal always stays open after submission; let's configure it to close the form if the update is successful. On error, we'll keep the form open for making further edits.

Triggering multiple actions on a UI event​

To bind multiple actions to a button event, you would have to write some JavaScript:

  1. Click on the JS button of the onClick field in EditConfirmButton's properties.
  2. The onClick field then converts to JavaScript. Paste in the following:
{{
  UpdateProductApi.run(
  () => { 
          ProductsQuery.run(); 
          closeModal('EditProductModal')
        },
  () => showAlert('Product update failed!'))
}}

This is similar to what you learned in part 2 about using JavaScript to define widget behavior. In Part 2, you wrote JavaScript to trigger one action onSuccess of onClick - but here, you're configuring two actions! The first argument to the run() method is an anonymous JavaScript function that triggers two actions in the onSuccess case of onClick:

  1. Execute the ProductQuery.
  2. Close the modal.

Note that since these actions happen asynchronously, they would all run in parallel. You can trigger as many actions as you want within onSuccess and onError by wrapping them within an anonymous function.

Try to edit a product again and verify that the form-submit works as expected.

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GUI vs JavaScript: What to use when?

You'll often be able to customize app behavior more finely by writing JavaScript, as compared to only using the GUI.

For example, configuring multiple actions to be run in onSuccess is supported only via JavaScript, because it's easier to write code for it than it's to configure by using the GUI.

Similarly, to configure conditional behavior, writing ternary conditions in JavaScript is easier and more extensible; hence the GUI doesn't provide for it.

We recommend that you spend some time fiddling with JavaScript on Appsmith!

Sharing your app​

Now deploy your app for the final time!

Once deployed, you can share your deployed application with both internal and external users:

  1. Click on the "Share" button on the top right.
  2. Share the application's URL with the user, OR
  3. Invite a user by adding their email, selecting an appropriate role for them, and clicking INVITE.

You can also make the application public, in which case, anyone with the URL to the application can view it without needing to sign in. (Read more about access control.)

What's next?

The basic Catalog Dashboard is now up and running. This also marks the end of the beginner tutorial. At this point, you should know enough to start a project of your own and start playing around. The following resources will come in handy as you need to learn new tricks: