Below you'll find a list of updates to our documentation and to our free, online training resources available at Academy Online.
We've added an exciting feature to the docs site: you can now hover over a heading on a page and click to copy the URL.
Hovering over a particular heading, you'll notice a link icon appear next to the heading. If you hover on the icon, you can click to copy that URL with the anchor to your clipboard. This avoids the previous click, click, click of manually copying the heading anchor link.
We are excited to announce the following search updates that will help you find what you're looking for:
Take this course to learn about new and enhanced features of the Appian platform that you should start to use for building applications. This course teaches you how to leverage these new features and make it easier for you to transition to working with future versions of Appian. Consider whether the new functionality provided this quarter should replace or modify existing features and configurations across your applications to increase ease of maintainability, enhance performance, or enable more modern and flexible designs. Topics include: Process Automation and Optimization, Portals, Data Fabric, Interfaces, Application Development, Deployment, and Administration. You can enroll in the course directly.
We’ve reorganized our expressions content to better support the new developer’s journey. Now you have a central location where you can navigate the whole process of building, testing, and maintaining an expression.
You can more easily find information related to using the expression editor, and design objects that support more complicated expression scenarios are assembled into a single easily-browsed list.
Take this course to learn about two types of user experience that you can create in Appian, sites and portals. You’ll learn about the key differences between sites and portals, common use cases for each, and steps to build them using Appian low-code capabilities. This course is accompanied by two hands-on practice exercises. You can enroll in the course directly.
Interested in learning how to use Appian Process Mining?
In our new Process Mining Tutorial, you'll use Appian Process Mining to discover insights and optimization opportunities for a business process.
In Mining Prep, you'll:
In Process Mining, you'll:
We recommend this tutorial to anyone interested in hands-on experience working with Appian Process Mining.
We are excited to release a new tool for designers to create attractive, easy-to-use interfaces in Appian: the SAIL Design System site at design.appian.com. This site, combined with the SAIL UI framework, helps designers quickly craft beautiful interfaces with less development.
A design system is made up of reusable components and clear standards that are combined to create applications. Combining this new website along with the components and expressions you already know and love will be sure to kickstart your creativity and help you develop easy-to-use interfaces for your users.
We've created a new guide to data modeling with records so you can learn how to collect and connect your data in Appian. You will learn how to analyze your app's data needs and sketch a data model and then build your record types using Appian's low-code data features.
Have you ever wanted an easy button to copy an example expression? We know you have—so we've delivered it! Look for the Copy icon on the top-right of any expression example in the docs. Simply click to copy the entire expression.
The Explore view in Appian Designer is a new page that gives you immediate insight into the structure of your application, its packages, and supporting documentation. Watch this video to take a tour of the view and its contents. For empty applications, learn about the three recommended objects commonly used as starting points when first building an application.
This course introduces you to using Appian to automate workflows that combine people, technologies, and data, to maximize resources and improve business results. Appian provides a complete suite of automation capabilities; you can implement the combination of capabilities best suited to your needs. You'll see examples of how businesses have successfully used Appian to automate their workflows. This course is part of the new Appian Automation learning path that is for senior developers who've earned an associate developer certification. You can enroll in this course directly.
Take this course to learn about new and enhanced features of the Appian platform that you should start to use for building applications. This course teaches you how to leverage these new features and make it easier for you to transition to working with future versions of Appian. Consider whether the new functionality provided this quarter should replace or modify existing features and configurations across your applications to increase ease of maintainability, enhance performance, or enable more modern and flexible designs. Topics include: Enhanced Application Designer; Data Syncing; Queries and Reporting; Automation; User Interfaces; and Process Mining. You can enroll in the course directly.
Your business process looks great in a flowchart, but why do the performance metrics tell a different story? The key to finding the answers is Appian Process Mining, a new way to analyze and improve your business processes.
Learn how to use Mining Prep to extract, transform, and load your business process data, using low-code transformation. Then learn how to use the automated analysis provided by the Process Mining module to identify critical issues and improve your processes.
You can enroll in the path directly.
Take this course to learn about new and enhanced features of the Appian platform that you should start to use for building applications. This course teaches you how to leverage these new features and make it easier for you to transition to working with future versions of Appian. Consider whether the new functionality provided this quarter should replace or modify existing features and configurations across your applications to increase ease of maintainability, enhance performance, or enable more modern and flexible designs.
Topics include:
You can enroll in the course directly.
We've created a new set of Automation docs to make it easy for you to discover how to extend automation throughout your applications. These docs describe all of our automation capabilities and provide guidance on when you should use each one, depending on your specific needs.
We're eager to help you to save time, reduce costs, and adapt to changing environments with automation. You can find the Automation docs right on our homepage. Go check them out!
Updated for 2022, this course provides an introduction to the Appian platform and its capabilities. You'll start by learning what Appian is, and how Appian low-code tools allow you to build scalable and feature-rich applications fast. Then you'll explore our extensive suite of capabilities: Robotic Processes Automation (RPA), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), Process Mining, and Appian Portals, and ways in which these can serve the automation needs of your business.
You can complete this course as part of our Appian Developer or Appian Foundations learning path, or enroll in the course directly.
Publish Appian Portals is the second course in the new Appian Portals Learning Path. In this course, developers can continue their Portals learning journey and learn how to connect portals and Appian applications so that users can request information or kick off a process in Appian.
You can enroll in the course directly.
Appian Portals is the new front door to your public-facing applications. This powerful, new capability allows unauthenticated, public users to interact with Appian applications.
In this learning path, you'll learn more about Appian Portals, benefits, and common use cases. Developers will see how to publish and maintain an Appian Portal.
You can enroll in the path directly.
Appian Portals is a new offering that allows you to easily build and manage public web portals that capture and share data with your Appian application.
This course, Introduction to Appian Portals, is designed to provide developers with an in-depth overview of Appian Portals, what the feature includes, and when it is best used for your business needs. Take this course to learn more!
You can enroll in the course directly.
Appian Records can help you discover new insights about your data. To help you get started, we've built a new set of query recipes with examples of recommended approaches for both simple and advanced queries using records.
You can test out these recipes in the Appian Retail application and then apply what you learn in your own apps. Appian Retail is available for free in Appian Community Edition.
Learn more about testing strategies for creating and maintaining high-quality applications. Good testing ensures your application objects, processes, and data are not only performant and reliable, but also meet application goals and needs.
This path covers expression rule testing, user acceptance testing, in-flight testing, two types of performance testing, and more. This path will help to prepare you for the Appian Senior Developer Certification exam.
You can enroll in the path directly.
This course is part of the Testing and Quality Assurance learning path.
Take this course to learn about foundational testing techniques used to ensure an application meets the acceptance criteria of development as well as end-user needs. This course covers design documents, unit testing, accessibility testing, expression rule testing, exploratory testing, and user acceptance testing.
You can enroll in the course directly.
This course is part of the Testing and Quality Assurance learning path.
Take this course to learn about two more testing strategies for creating and maintaining high-quality applications. These testing types ensure your application objects, processes, and data are not only performant and reliable, but also scalable. This course covers in-flight testing, as well as two types of performance testing, database volume testing and concurrent load testing.
You can enroll in the course directly.
Take this course to learn how to transform data into event logs for analysis and discovery in process mining. Event logs reveal patterns in the actual execution of processes that enable you to understand how well an organization runs critical workflows.
In this course, you'll learn how to collect event data from transactional systems, assemble time-stamped data into uniform event logs, and load your results into Appian Process Mining. You'll gain hands-on experience working with real-world process mining datasets.
You can enroll in the course directly.
Take this course to learn about new and enhanced features of the Appian platform that you should start to use for building applications. This course teaches you how to leverage these new features and make it easier for you to transition to working with future versions of Appian. Consider whether the new functionality provided this quarter should replace or modify existing features and configurations across your applications to increase ease of maintainability, enhance performance, or enable more modern and flexible designs.
Topics in this course include:
This course is designed for experienced Appian practitioners.
You can enroll in the course directly.
With more low-code reporting features available each release, we've created a new set of reporting patterns to help you create advanced reports with little to no code. You can easily follow along with these reporting patterns in the new Appian Retail application, available for free in Appian Community Edition.
We've updated the docs glossary to be more comprehensive and easier to use! The glossary content has been completely revamped with the most up-to-date terms and definitions across the entire Appian platform. Additionally, the glossary can now be dynamically filtered, searched, and sorted, making it easy to find what you are looking for. Use the new drop-down field to filter by category, use the search field to locate an exact term, or click the Term column header to change the sort.
To complement the wider release of Appian's built-in document extraction services, we've expanded and reorganized content about these features. Notably, we've added a number of use cases to show you how to apply these features in different business contexts. We also created a glossary to serve as a reference as you learn about the feature suite.
If you're eager to get started, but not sure how to start, see Evaluating Doc Extraction Features. This step-by-step guide will put you on the right path towards the features best suited for your business.
Primarily for experienced Appian Developers, the purpose of this course is to help you gain the knowledge and skills necessary to design, develop, and deliver applications fast with low-code data features and functionality.
Explore:
This course features a hands-on learning experience to practice these records features using the new Appian Retail application in your Appian Community Edition environment. You will also have access to case studies that explore how you can apply these features to existing applications.
You can enroll in the course directly.
As an Appian Developer, you have experience planning, building, and testing process models. You're likely familiar with the variety of smart services and nodes and know how to test and troubleshoot a process model. Now it's time to learn more about planning and building process models that are performant and scalable. In this learning path, you'll learn how to design short-lived processes, implement looping, and to read and analyze process metrics that are available to you as a process model designer. Prepare to learn about additional smart services and plug-ins, important best practices, and—of course—make sure to complete hands-on Appian Step-by-Step exercises that accompany both courses. Study and experiment with 13 process models in the Acme Automobile application, available in your Appian Community Edition environment.
You can enroll in the course directly.
While many of our accessibility features are transparent—designers do not have to do anything special to benefit from them—a number of UI design choices do dictate the quality of experience for people with disabilities. This course teaches you how to plan for and design user experiences that enable all users to fully engage with Appian applications.
You can enroll in the course directly.
Expressions are an essential tool in Appian. You can use them to manipulate your data to suit your business needs. In this introductory course, you'll learn the different components of an expression and how to use them effectively in different combinations. You'll also learn how to create an expression rule and be introduced to a variety of out-of-the-box functions. Throughout the course, you can reinforce your knowledge with a number of hands-on exercises, including practice on creating an expression rule and working with functions.
You can enroll in the course directly.
Take this course to learn about new and enhanced features of the Appian platform that you should start to use for building applications. This course teaches you how to leverage these new features and make it easier for you to transition to working with future versions of Appian. Consider whether the new functionality provided this quarter should replace or modify existing features and configurations across your applications to increase ease of maintainability, enhance performance, or enable more modern and flexible designs.
Topics in this course include:
This course is designed for experienced Appian practitioners.
You can enroll in the course directly.
With over a thousand styled icons available, we thought you might appreciate the ability to search them, so we added a search box to the icon table. The perceptive user might notice that the icon table itself is actually an Appian interface. So, if you're wondering if the list is complete, it's coming directly from the Appian Platform. That's right, we're bringing low-code development to our docs as well!
We've reorganized and expanded the DevOps content to better support your DevOps journey with Appian. Now all of our content related to testing, deploying, and monitoring applications using DevOps practices is in one place!
With Appian deployments now faster than ever, we've also updated our deployment docs to be just as streamlined. You can easily find guidance on what, when, and how to deploy different types of changes using the deployment method that's right for you.
We've improved the Appian RPA REST API documentation to use a more consistent and streamlined organization. Each page now includes example request and response bodies, so you can easily verify if your request or response is formatted properly. We've also added a note to the top of each method's page to remind you to use the proper authentication headers, which can be a small but frustrating misstep when using the API.
With the new ability to create schemas in the Appian Cloud database, along with the addition of some new stored procedures, we realized we needed a new home for our Appian Cloud Database Administration documentation.
So we streamlined and reorganized our existing content and created a new page. Then we added a whole bunch of helpful content about how to use schemas to control access to data and how to use stored procedures. If you are an Appian Cloud database customer, be sure to check it out.
Appian applications can be easily set up to interact with external systems. To learn how to set up integrations, take the two courses in our new Integrations learning path. Designed for experienced Appian developers, these courses will teach you how to integrate with systems outside of Appian. This includes an Appian application requesting to connect to an external system, and an external system requesting to connect to an Appian application. After viewing the courses, complete the hands-on exercises to learn how to create and test Appian's integration objects.
The final and third course in this learning path is coming soon, and it's all about connected system authentication! You can get started now by enrolling in the first and second courses.
Two new courses teach you how to work with complex functions and expression patterns. Practice what you learn by completing exercises using the Appian Community Edition environment. You'll learn how to create re-usable and performant expressions, and how to use expressions to navigate and reference various data structures. Build more advanced expressions that include nested logic and looping functions. Query record types efficiently and analyze the performance of your expressions.
This learning path is intended for certified Appian Associate Developers. It is part of the Appian Senior Developer course series and will help to prepare you for the Appian Certified Senior Developer exam.
You can complete the two courses by enrolling in our Appian Advanced Expressions learning path. You can also enroll separately in Part 1 and Part 2 of Advanced Expressions.
Take this course if your organization is planning to acquire an Appian Solution, and you want to have a better grasp of what a solution is, and how to effectively handle the implementation effort. This course will discuss the benefits of using a solution, ways to adapt it to specific organizational requirements, and steps to take to ensure a successful and speedy implementation of your solution. You will also get to know additional learning resources.
You can enroll in the course directly.
Appian provides a wide variety of interface patterns that help you save time and jump start the design process. These patterns are predefined components and dynamic expressions that represent popular interface designs. You'll learn where to locate these patterns and how to find the ones that meet your design needs. You'll learn how to add the patterns to an interface and where to find guidance on customizing them for your purposes. Along the way, we'll showcase some great examples to inspire you to browse Appian's comprehensive library of patterns on your own.
This course is part of the Appian Senior Developer course series and will help to prepare you for the Appian Certified Senior Developer exam.
You can complete this course as part of our Appian Advanced UX Design learning path or enroll in the course directly.
Creating robotic processes (bots) is now a low-code experience. This updated learning path contains a new course, Creating Bots with Appian. In that course you'’'ll learn what RPA is, how it can be used in Appian applications, and how to design and build low-code bots. There are also three tutorials using the low-code modules for browser, image recognition, and Windows UI Automation.
Also in the learning path is an optional course on extending Appian RPA. That course explains how you can write Workflow Libraries in Java to extend the functionality of Appian RPA. There are also tutorials to help you practice what you learn.
You can enroll in the course directly.
Interested in learning how to use Appian to orchestrate an Appian RPA bot?
In our new tutorial, Build a Retrieval Process, you'll use low-code methods to create a robotic process that retrieves information from a public web page. Then, you'll create an Appian process model and related objects to trigger the bot and manage the data the bot returns.
We recommend this tutorial to anyone interested in hands-on experience working with Appian and Appian RPA together.
You might notice some of our component pages feature a new interactive code sample editor! Rather than copying and pasting an example into an expression, you can now change and evaluate the sample code directly in the documentation. Our team is excited to introduce this new component, which uses a read-evaluate-print loop (REPL), to the docs to help demonstrate the power and speed of Appian components.
Check out the Pie Chart component to see it in action.
In this course from our new UX Design learning path, you'll learn about important design considerations for apps that will be used on multiple devices: desktops, tablets, and phones. Learn how user behaviors differ by device, and how it impacts your design choices. Watch our video lessons to learn how specific UI components behave on mobile devices, how to recognize which UI components are likely to require an optimization, and how to perform optimization steps. You can complete this course as part of our Appian UX Design learning path or enroll in the course directly.
Building business applications that are a pleasure to use requires much more than just satisfying functional requirements. This course from our new UX Design learning path will teach you how to incorporate essential visual design principles using Appian's tools, and how to create emotionally appealing user experiences that are also intuitive and highly efficient to use. Refine your visual design skills with the powerful tips from the Appian UX Design team. You can complete this course as part of our Appian UX Design learning path or enroll in the course directly.
Updated for 2021, this course provides an introduction to the Appian platform. You'll start by learning why companies around the world choose Appian to help transform their businesses. Then you'll learn the key components used to build an application in Appian, and see how these building blocks come together. This course serves as a springboard for you to move on to the technical courses in the Appian Developer learning path. You can complete this course as part of our Appian Developer or Appian Foundations learning path or enroll in the course directly.
We've reorganized Appian RPA help content to better support a low-code developer's journey. Starting with RPA 7.7, the newly streamlined docs introduce you to Appian RPA, help you get started building robotic processes, and show you how to integrate RPA with your Appian applications.
More experienced developers can still find the Java-focused content in the Custom Code Development section. Let us know your thoughts through the Feedback widget on any Appian RPA page.
Crafting a great user experience requires research and planning before application construction begins. Specifically, you must understand who your users are and what they need to achieve. A superior design allows those users to successfully complete their work quickly and easily. This course covers how to incorporate user-centered priorities from the planning stage through the end of application development. You can complete this course as part of our Appian UX Design learning path or enroll in the course directly.
As Appian Records continue to make the app development experience faster and easier, we wanted your documentation experience to be just as fast and easy. So this release, we've provided a complete guide to help you create, build, and leverage records seamlessly throughout your application. With new and updated content, you'll find the latest information about records that highlight cool new features and reinforce the power records bring to your applications.
With all your record content in one place, you'll be able to learn about Appian Records just as fast as you can build with them. Check out the newest Appian Records content here.
Students learn Appian's suggested program management techniques including organizing teams, planning, planning the right features, automating deployment steps, and ensuring easy maintenance for the long term. This is an instructor-led course.
Enrollments are open now, so check for upcoming sessions on Appian Community.
Put fundamental knowledge to work with a hands-on Appian use case. In this instructor-led course, students will learn the basics of Appian's delivery methodology and quality assurance practices while working through delivery of a functioning application.
Enrollments are open now, so check for upcoming sessions on Appian Community.
In this instructor-led course, students learn how to create visually appealing, intuitive, and valuable applications to end users. This course will teaches elements of good interface design, simplifying complicated information, and creating an experience centered on the users themselves.
Enrollments are open now, so check for upcoming sessions on Appian Community.
Process models are a standard tool for depicting business workflows. In Appian, these models aren't static. Appian translates your business workflows to executable processes. In this course, you'll learn how to use Appian's Process Modeler to design and build scalable processes, using standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). A major component of applications is the creation, editing, and moving of data through the lifecycle of your business workflows. You'll see how to add and configure process components that perform a variety of activities. As a final step, you'll learn how to test and troubleshoot a process. You can complete this course as part of our Appian Developer learning path or enroll in the course directly.
Interested in learning how to incorporate Appian AI into your application? We've got you covered with new and updated Appian AI content. Appian AI allows you to integrate modern AI capabilities like computer vision, document extraction, and natural language processing seamlessly into your application.
As one of the AI features offered by Appian AI, Appian's Document Extraction content has also been updated to help you seamlessly create your own document extraction process.
Not sure where Appian AI fits in your process? Check out some industry use cases that illustrate the different ways you can enhance your existing processes with best-in-class Google Cloud Platform Artificial Intelligence services.
If you’re new to Appian RPA, you’re probably looking to understand the basics before you move on to development. Even if you’re a seasoned robotic process developer, a refresher can be helpful.
Check out an in-depth description of libraries in Appian RPA. We cover the types of libraries, why you should use libraries, and how to deploy them to your code repository.
In Appian, queries are used to return data from relational databases. Query filters define the conditions for returning the data. You can organize the returned data in meaningful ways, such as in charts and reports, to support business decisions, answer questions, and complete other tasks.
In this course, you’ll learn how to use the Query Editor to create and test queries. You’ll also learn how to use the a!queryEntity() function to create advanced queries. You’ll see how queries are used by interfaces and process models.You can complete this course as part of our Appian Developer learning path or enroll in the course directly.
This course teaches new Appian Developers how to leverage interface patterns and work with advanced interface elements and components, including dynamic lists, dynamic links, conditional display, and editable grids. You can complete this course as part of our Appian Developer learning path or enroll in the course directly.
This course for existing Appian Developers teaches how to jump start your organization’s application development with proven design patterns – while absorbing some of the lessons learned from other projects that followed design patterns that you may want to avoid, which we call anti-patterns. You can complete this course as part of our Appian Advanced Developer learning path or enroll in the course directly.
This course teaches existing Appian Developers more advanced data design and configuration for Appian data structures. Users learn how to leverage JPA annotations and nested CDTs to ensure alignment with RDBMS requirements. You can complete this course as part of our Appian Advanced Developer learning path or enroll in the course directly.
You’re ready to build an application using Appian. Where should you start? This course helps you plan and organize the things that are needed to build a robust application. The goal of this course is to set you on a path to successful application building and avoid costly mistakes you didn’t plan for. You can complete this course as part of our Appian Developer learning path or enroll in the course directly.
We're continually building ways for you to execute robotic processes seamlessly in all the contexts you might use Appian RPA. To help you decide which options are best for you, we assembled a list of all the Ways to Execute a Robotic Process.
This page was recently updated to include the specific ways to use the Appian RPA connected system to kick off a robotic process in a process model, interface, and Web API.
Interested in becoming an Appian Developer? We recommend signing up for one of our instructor-led courses. You can go to community.appian.com for more information and course schedules.
However, if you prefer a self-paced, online format, you should enroll in the Appian Developer learning path at Academy Online. To help get you started, we’ve recently added a new online “Welcome” course that provides learners with a variety of helpful resources and tools, including a short overview of the learning path with recommended “steps for success.”
A critical aspect of learning Appian is practice building an application, so we’ve also included a new Developer’s Skills Practice guide that provides a series of exercises you can follow along with to build an application. After each course in the path, you should complete associated course exercises.
If you’re an online learner, be sure to take advantage of these great, new resources!
Over the last few quarters, Appian has introduced a number of product improvements that make managing deployments a lot easier. Now, you can connect your development, test, and production environments and use the Compare and Deploy feature to easily create application deployment packages for new applications or updates to existing applications (a.k.a patches).
To support these product imporovements and your knowledge and skills development, we recently released a new course that teaches you how to configure your connected environments and leverage the Compare and Deploy feature to create, deploy, and manage application deployment packages across environments. You’ll learn how Appian automatically checks for missing objects in your deployment package. You’ll also learn how to interpret and proceed with different statuses for objects that have been previously deployed to your target environment. Lastly, you’ll see how to deploy both database scripts and import customization files alongside your application deployment package.
You can complete this course as part of our Appian Developer learning path or enroll in the course directly.
As we all know, data is a huge part of every application. Knowing how to work with relational databases is essential to learning how to use the Appian platform to create scalable, enterprise-worthy applications. We want to help kickstart your knowledge by introducing you to key database terms and concepts that will help you build powerful applications.
Let's hone your database knowledge and skills with Appian's new Database Design Basics course. This course teaches you what a database is and how to use it. You learn about database schema design, relationship types, and how to differentiate between a primary key and a foreign key. You'll also learn how to create entity relationship diagrams (ERDs).
If you’re unfamiliar with database concepts, we recommend taking the Database Design Basics course prior to going through the Appian Developer learning path.
With the release of Appian RPA, we've created a new learning path specifically for developing robotic processes (bots). The knowledge you gain from this learning path, combined with your Java skills, will enable you to build bots to automate your business processes.
In addition to the new Appian RPA content, we are also debuting a new learning medium: .pdf guides. These guides combine text instructions, screen captures, and code snippets to create an useful and comprehensive learning experience. I hope this approach helps you learn how to develop bots efficiently and effectively.
Check out the robotic process automation learning path at academy.appian.com, and please answer the survey at the end. We love your feedback!
Great business applications should be more than just functional! That's the topic of our newest online training course: UX Design and Appian. In this course, you'll learn why UX design is so valuable to your application, how to plan and get feedback on your interface designs, and learn best practices for working with interface layouts and components.
Throughout this course, we'll showcase different designs and interface patterns to expand your knowledge of what's possible in Appian. Click here to get started!
Come visit us on Academy Online to engage in your new learning experience. While you're there, check out our welcome video for information about new features, start learning with one of the learning paths, or enroll in the new UX design course.
The new learning system is a fresh, modern portal to everything you need to learn Appian. The new navigation, search, and filtering capabilities make it easier than ever to locate the content you want – when you want it. We also have more quizzes and revamped skills practices to help you gauge your learning and practice your newly acquired skills.
We're excited to roll out this new experience! Email us with any comments or questions: academyonline@appian.com.
Have you ever wondered what it takes to improve your application development life cycle? DevOps is the answer! Appian provides a complete DevOps journey that will help you streamline processes, facilitate more efficient best practices, and much more. DevOps with Appian is a new set of documentation that will explain what DevOps is and what benefits you gain from it. Start learning about DevOps today and see for yourself the dramatic improvements in your development life cycle.
The new Grid Tutorial walks you through building a grid. Even though this tutorial teaches you all the major elements of the new grid, it still only takes about 15 minutes to complete because of how easy the new grid is.
We also have a new page that explains everything you need to know about Configuring the Read-Only Grid.
From any interface component page, you can find a new section, Related Patterns. Rather than just a handful of links to select patterns, this section displays all relevant patterns that use the component, letting you quickly find the right example to get you going. Check it out on the new Read-Only Grid Component page.
Excited about the new local variable and refresh variable functions? We've got you covered with a lot of new content, and updated examples, so you can start using them right away.
There are two new reference pages for each function that cover the details.
To take advantage of these new functions, learn how to quickly adapt your existing usage from Updating Expressions to Use Local Variables to learn how you can quickly adapt.
New examples for refreshing variables:
Disable Automatic Refresh After User Saves Into a Variable (Auto-Refresh): Automatically update a variable when its dependencies change until the user saves their own value into that variable.
Display Last Refresh Time (Auto-Refresh, Grids, Records): Display the last time the interface was updated, either based on a user interaction or a timer.
Refresh Data After Executing a Smart Service (Auto-Refresh, Smart Services):
Refresh Data Using a Refresh Button (Auto-Refresh):
Refresh Until Asynchronous Action Completes (Auto-Refresh): Use a refresh interval to display the results of an asynchronous action automatically.
Working with data in Appian often starts with creating Custom Data Types (CDTs). This new page will help you understand how CDT relationships work and what factors to consider when designing your CDTs for your Appian application.
Many of you have come to rely on the UX Design Guide for best practice suggestions when using specific interface components and layouts. While knowing the rules for choosing button styles or label positions is helpful, the greatest opportunities for improving usability come from looking at the flow of your entire app. How will users complete their tasks from beginning to end? When someone first lands on a given page, how will they make sense of how content is organized? Making visually-appealing UIs is an understandable goal, but the best way to take full advantage of the value Appian provides is ensuring the users of your apps can easily and efficiently do their work.
To help you think about ways to make your users more effective, we've published a new Design Guide topic: Presenting Information Clearly. This page covers the basics of information architecture while showing examples of common do's and don'ts.
New this month is a tutorial on building a record! Watch the videos, follow along with the written instructions, or do both as you build a record. At the end of the tutorial, you’ll have a fully configured List View and Summary View.
Follow the directions in the tutorial to download the Getting Started application and sample data, or request a free trial site, which comes pre-loaded with the Getting Started app and sample data. Try it out!
To coincide with the new year, we’re introducing a new course on Academy Online: Appian Essentials! In this course, you’ll get an introduction to Appian and see how companies are using Appian to revolutionize their business practices. You’ll answer common questions such as How does Appian display data? and How is work completed in Appian? as well as participate in fun activities designed to enhance your learning!
