January: Slack, data wizard, table views, secrets management

Summary

• 💌 Slack integration: Connect your Slack workspace and trigger dynamic messages to public channels or individuals programmatically.‍
• 🧙Data wizard: Load data from your Google Sheet or SQL data source without writing a line of code. All queries are generated in the background.‍
• 👀 Table views: Add multiple data views to any table in your apps. Even better: Your users can create and store their own views with custom filters, sorting and column configuration.‍
• 🗝 Secrets management: Sensitive credentials can now be managed in a dedicated secrets management interface. These secret values can be injected in data source configurations without exposing their values to anyone, ever.‍
• 👈 Code navigation: Navigating from a JavaScript variable to the referenced action, component, or state variable is now possible with a single click.

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Let’s break it down

Slack integration

Slack is a central tool for many teams, including ours. Beyond sharing gifs, receiving automated notifications from your tools is a key productivity enabler. With our latest release, Uify will join that party! Connect your workspace with the standard authentication flow and all your team members will be able to push programmatic notifications to public channels or individual team members. The message content can - as always - be highly dynamic using embedded JavaScript snippets. You can also include a button leading the recipient to the Uify app, where their attention is required.

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Data wizard

Data tables are usually based on external data sources. Reading data and writing data back to them requires creating a set of actions and usually writing a small amount of code. With our latest release we made this process way easier than it used to be. You can now use our intuitive data wizard to create an editable table on top of your MySQL/PostgreSQL database or a Google Sheet. The preview allows you to select the displayed columns before the table is added to your app. All required actions are generated automatically with full flexibility to make adjustments afterwards.

You can initiate this wizard from various places in the app, e.g., from the Table properties panel, an empty table, or via the context menu of a data source:

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Table views

It is now possible to create multiple views on the same table dataset. A view contains a custom set of filters, sorts and column configurations (visibility, order, width) and will be available for all end users of an app by default. On top of that, end users may create their own personalized views, which will not be accessible by anyone else.

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Secrets management

Data source configurations often involve highly sensitive credentials, which should only be accessible to authorized members of your team. Workspace admins now have the ability to manage secrets and their values centrally in the settings. Once created, the values will never be visible in the frontend again. You may now use these secrets in most of the configuration options for data sources and the Uify backend will dynamically inject their values when attempting to connect to your data source. Simply type {{ in your data source settings or use the respective icon to access your secrets:

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Code navigation

Every action, component and state value is exposed as a variable with a specific structure in the JavaScript code of your app. You may want to navigate to the entity that is referenced by such a variable to check its properties or behavior. This is now possible by performing CMD+click (Mac) / CTRL+click (Windows) on the variable in the code editor. The UI state will be adjusted to bring the referenced entity into view, for example, the active tab of a Tabbed Container will change or a hidden Modal will be made visible:

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Additional improvements

Not enough yet? No worries, here is some more:

• OAuth2 for REST: The REST data source now offers to configure an authentication flow. The first supported method is the OAuth2 client-credentials flow (we will add more in the near future). Access tokens will be refreshed in the background automatically when they expire.
• Table tags management: Editable table columns of type tags offer the end user a list of all available values in the particular column. With our latest release, you can now configure those options with a simple UI, including a choice of color presets. The ability to use JavaScript for highly dynamic setups is of course still available as well.
• Date range input component: This new component allows your users to enter a date range with a start- and end-date, supported by our convenient visual range picker.
• Intercom support: Quick question? Unknown error? Need support? You can now engage in a quick chat with our support team via Intercom at any time. Simply hit the support icon in the bottom-left corner of the editor and we will help you out!
• Programmatically accessible query-string params: URL parameters provided at app load are now accessible through JavaScript code via the url.params variable. Conversions to common data types like numbers, booleans and arrays happen automatically.
• Embedded mode: In case you would like to focus a certain group of your users on one specific app only (e.g., embedded inside another tool), you can now achieve that by replacing the /app/ in the URL with /app-embedded/. This embedded mode hides the workspace navigation and keeps the user in the particular app at all times.
• Bug fixes & improvements: On top of all the features mentioned above, we applied 39 additional bug fixes and improvements 🚀.

Give those new features a try and let us know what you think. Remember, we are always just one Intercom chat away 😜.

Happy building,

Dom

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