Data Management
The third section of the app builder allows you to manage the data model of your application. Many web application require a database with an appropriate data model to store some data. For an AirBnB clone for example, you need to store information about users, places, bookings, payments, reviews... and the relationships between these informations (e.g. the link between a user and its booking. Infinable gives you the tools to manage the data model of your application without prior knowledge of database systems. To learn more about data models, visit our Data Model for Beginners section.
To create a new data source in your data model, you have multiple options:
- Create the data source from scratch: you will specify all the fields (the columns) of the data source manually
- Create the data source from existing source: you can reuse an existing source of data (e.g. an excel spreadsheet) to create your data source and initialize it with some data
Starting point to create a new data source
Other data connections can be installed for your app using Plugins (you will learn more about that later in the tutorial).
When you create a data source from scratch, you have to specify the fields of the data source (equivalent to the columns of an excel sheet):
For each field you have to specify a name, a type (type of information of the field: e.g. text, email, image, geographic address...), whether it is a list (e.g. a list of tags for a product will be specified as a list of text), whether it is a required field (if it is the case, the application will raise an error if the field is not provided when a new item is created), whether it is a unique field (for example, an email field might be unique as we don't want to have multiple accounts with the same email address) and finally a default value for the field if its value is not specified.
If you start with an excel spreadsheet or a CSV file, Infinable will use the columns as potential fields for the data source. You still have to specify the type of field and whether or not you want to include it in the data source.
Create a data source from an Excel sheet or a CSV file
When you go to the "Data Management" section of the application builder, you view the list of data sources of your data model.
For each data source you can:
- Edit the data source
- View the data inside the data source and create/edit items or upload data
- Delete the data source
List of Data Sources in AirBnB Clone Data Model
For visualization and presentation purpose, it is nice to view of graph of your data model.
This "Graph View" will show you:
- the fields of each data source
- the connections between the data sources (e.g. a user has done some reviews on possibly multiple rooms)
Data Model visualization with Data Sources and Relations - AirBnB Clone
To manage your data, you need to have access to a view of the data for each data source and this is what the data explorer is about.
Explore data of a Data Source - User Data in AirBnB clone
You can click on "Add" to create a new user in your data source:
Create a new record in the Data Source - User Data in AirBnB clone
You can click on a row in the table to edit a data item:
Edit properties of a data record - User Data in AirBnB clone
Instead of creating items one by one, you can use the data uploader to import data from an excel spreadsheet, a CSV file or other data sources. Click on "Actions" near the "Add" button and then "Upload".
You can also export your data to CSV by clicking on "Actions" and then "Export" and a CSV will be downloaded.
Last modified 3yr ago