What’s New in Skuid?¶

Versioning in Skuid¶

Beginning with Spark, major releases of Skuid may feature a new API version in addition to supporting previous APIs.

Spark provides two API versions: API Version 1 and API Version 2.

API Version 1 corresponds to the API used by Millau (the previous major release of Skuid). API Version 1 supports some of the new product features of Spark:

• App and Page Templates (the apps and pages built with API Version 1 components and themes)
• new actions in the Action Framework
• compatibility with Private Data Service.

API Version 2 corresponds to the API used by Spark’s new features:

• App and Page Templates (the apps and pages built with API Version 2 components and themes)
• Ink component pack
• Design System Studio.

How do I use Skuid’s API versions? API versions are applied at the page level. When you create a Skuid page, you select the API version the page will use.

Skuid’s new API versioning structure gives you greater control over when you migrate your pages and apps to the latest Skuid features and components.

Designing in Style: the Design System Studio¶

Get ready for the comprehensive and flexible “no CSS” styling tool: the Design System Studio. Are you looking to …

• Increase style consistency? The Design System Studio is consistent by default—customize a button’s style in the DSS and that style is reflected everywhere your app uses that button. Add or adjust colors, make a shadow just for your text inputs, declare custom spacing and use it across all your components—whatever properties you set in a Design System Studio style variable ripples through all pages that use that variable.
• Reduce maintenance time? With the Design System Studio, develop the front-end with Skuid, not custom CSS. Need to change a color across the app? Do it in seconds without hunting down all the right CSS classes. Using the DSS lets you say goodbye to all the orphaned CSS scattered across your app.
• Have a living style guide? Instead of having a word-based style guide in a doc far from your front-end, why not have a style guide that actually affects the style of your app? Build a living and scalable style guide that anyone in your company can easily follow. Between top-level color choices and component-level icon colors, Skuid provides appropriate variable options, so you, the builder, can make informed decisions about a unified company style.
• Style flexibility? The Design System Studio offers builders over 400 customizable style variables at both a global and component level scale.

Introducing Skuid’s Ink Component Pack¶

Flexible, responsive, and scalable, the new Ink component pack offers a set of modern, streamlined, accessible components designed to work seamlessly with the Design System Studio. That’s right, Skuid is making it faster and easier for app builders to provide engaging, interactive, visually appealing user experiences with consistent styling and branding.

While some Ink components (Table, Deck, Chart, Button Set) share a name and purpose with Skuid’s Original components, this innovative set of components includes enhanced features, easier customization, and a few fresh options:

• Two new container components (the Accordion and the Tab Container) provide more ways to layout and organize the page.
• The Masthead—a container component designed to harness the power of the Navigation and Search and company logo—brings a more comprehensive navigation experience for your users.
• A Vertical Navigation component with expanded functionality for easier and more purposeful customization.
• A reskin of the App Composer to match the style of the Ink components.

Other Ink components provide familiar functionality with enhanced features under new names:

• Header replaces the Page Title
• Form steps in for the Field Editor, adding a new feature: include more than one field per row on the form!
• List simplifies the Queue
• The new Text component combines the power of the original Rich Text and Template components into a single page element.
• Grid replaces Responsive Grid and adds interactions

Why wait? Update to API v2 and start building with Ink!

Private Data Service¶

Enterprise data is sacred, and its security is paramount. But that security comes at a cost: it’s difficult to integrate your essential data in your applications while keeping it safe. With Spark’s release, there’s no more trade-offs! Skuid’s Private Data Service is an on-premise solution that interfaces with Skuid’s runtime while keeping your data within your private network.

Private Data Service is composed of several microservices that can be configured based on the needs of your organization—both in terms of where they live in your hardware stack and how they interact with the clusters of technology that make up your enterprise. Place a load balancer where needed, connect to multiple SQL data sources, connect to multiple Skuid sites. It’s a feature that empowers your tech stack while keeping it secure.

Once installed, the Private Data Service handles the authentication of users and analyzes their accounts’ permissions, cross-referencing those permissions with Skuid’s powerful data source object settings where appropriate, to securely deliver only the data your users are supposed to see. No data flows through a public cloud server. By leveraging the Skuid Private Data Service, even high-security companies can reap the rewards of Skuid’s drag-and-drop platform to quickly and efficiently build custom applications that customers and employees love to use — without sacrificing data privacy.

Native Mobile¶

You’ve been able to build pages that can be viewed on mobile devices for a while—after all, mobile browsers can access the internet. But with the Spark release, we are rolling out the capability to publish fully-native mobile packages to iOS and Android devices. That means your users can install and use your apps just like they would any other mobile app.

These mobile app package can be deployed to organizational users through mobile device management (MDM). And after deployment, your users never get left behind because your pages will stay up-to-date with any changes you make in Skuid’s App Composer. No rebuilding or redeploying required.

On top of that, we’re implementing a variety of native mobile actions to utilize the power of mobile devices:

• Launch push notifications from the Action Framework
• Several geolocation features: sort addresses by driving distance, open their map application for directions, see street views of addresses
• Share Skuid page content with native sharing widgets

App Templates¶

Start building your application from a pre-built template. Skuid’s App Template library provides application templates based on our experiences solving a wide range of business use cases.

Tear down, build up, and explore app templates to learn more about Skuid’s models and components. Reverse engineering a functioning app can be a great way to better understand how Skuid works and expand your app-building knowledge.

App Templates currently available include:

• Help Desk
  • This example customer support app demonstrates how team members can stay on top of every case, even offline when there is a spotty internet connection. Users can sort cases based on status, modify existing, or create new cases, and even sort the case list using voice commands — all from the same page. Comments made on cases can be automatically sent to subscribers via email or text. Team managers can easily keep track of employee schedules and monitor the number of cases in each status.
• Partner Portal
  • This example portal provides the following capabilities: marketing materials, company announcements, registering deals that the company can pursue, and asking the company to help with joint-marketing activities. The Partner Portal helps build relationships between a company and its partners, easing the flow of information and adding efficiencies to business operations.
• Sales Order Dashboard
  • This example dashboard shows the level of sophistication available without writing any code. Key stakeholders can quickly understand what is happening across the business, observe trends and determine where activity needs to be focussed. This dashboard uses various charts, geocharts and KPI’s to highlight sales performance.

Data Source Types¶

Create apps with a unified view of information across more popular data sources like MySQL, Amazon Redshift, Lex, Microsoft SQL, and Oracle.

With Skuid’s expanded list of pre-built Data Source Types (DSTs), customers now have the ability to interact with even more data without having to write any code. Skuid provides access to the largest and fastest-growing enterprise databases, including Redshift, Postgres, MySQL, Microsoft SQL and Oracle. With the Spark release, enterprises can break down trapped data silos and incorporate new databases into a 360-degree, single-pane view of the business.

Voice Interactions and AWS Lex¶

No longer are users bound by their keyboard. With Skuid’s new Lex data source type, you can access the powerful chatbot utilities provided by Amazon Web Services. After configuring your chatbots and their intents, enable voice on your pages to unlock voice-triggered sequences—Action Framework lists that are kicked off by voice input. And not only that, you can parse the input slots of those sequences for data!

Pull up your opportunities list, update the status of one, and save your changes—all the with sound of your voice. It’s possible through Lex and voice-triggered sequences.

REST Enhancements¶

RESTful APIs are the languages of the web. And while Skuid’s REST data source type has long-enabled you to connect to your disparate data sources, we’ve been working on new features that open the doors for connectivity that was before impossible.

• We now support REST APIs that return XML payloads.
• You can now build request bodies using template fields. As always, you can use payload generation snippets if your needs are more complex.
• Is your service sending back a response Skuid doesn’t understand? Intercept the response and transform it into a payload Skuid can parse using a snippet.

All of these features open up a wide array of APIs that were difficult, if not impossible, to access before.

Offline enhancements¶

• Toggle Offline Mode off and on with the Action Framework.
• Review and edit changes made while in Offline Mode. Launch a popup from the Action Framework where the details of pending changes may be viewed and modified before the page reconnects to the network.
• In the event of an unsuccessful Offline Mode sync, data is still saved in a separate “failed sync” cache—plus Skuid now informs users when there’s a row-level syncing error.

Explicitly define a “null” default value for boolean fields.¶

In a boolean world, False does not equal Null. In the App Composer, the default values for boolean fields can be set to null (none) when neither true nor false are the desired default values.