August: REST, Google Sheets and making developers' lives easier

A summary for the fast readers, ...

• Google Sheets integration: Reading from and writing to Google Sheets is now easily possible with our native integration
• REST integration: One of our most demanded features is finally available - send requests to any REST API with fully customizable headers and body
• Role-based app permissions: You now have granular control over who can use, edit and manage apps. Edit rights are separated by creator (=engineer) and collaborator (=product manager/designer/end user). Time to build together!
• Find usages: All programmatic usages of components, actions and state variables are now just one click away
• SQL schema explorer: For all SQL-/SOQL-based data sources the action editor now provides a convenient overview of the schema structure
• Additional improvements: Multi-component dragging, using date-fns anywhere, greatly improved performance - all of this plus XX additional improvements and bug fixes

... and here the full details

Google Sheets integration

We are all using Google Sheets in many occasions. With our latest release, you are now able to utilize your sheets as data sources for your Uify apps. In addition to reading and writing specific ranges of your sheets, you can also read, update and create rows by utilizing a primary key column - just like interacting with a database!

REST integration

Our team ❤️ Postman for handling REST APIs, so our ambition was to make REST interactions in Uify as powerful. You can now make requests to REST APIs with ease, while keeping sensitive credentials safely hidden. All parts of your requests such as query-string parameters, headers and the JSON body, are dynamically configurable, using the scripting features that you already know from our app editor.

Role-based app permissions

Beyond the global workspace roles, you can now define permissions at app-level for your organization or specific individuals. Some of your colleagues might have full access to adjust permissions or release a new version of an app, while others are only allowed to view and use the app in the workspace. For the peace of mind of our engineering users: You can now assign the collaborator role to users who are involved in building the UI and configuring components, but who should not make changes to code. This feature brings us a big step forward on our vision to enable engineers and non-engineers to rapidly ship solutions together.

Finding usages

Usage tracking is a powerful IDE feature which our engineering team uses every day. In our editor however it has still been too easy to break functionality by changing or deleting components, actions or state variables, which are used in code snippets elsewhere in the app. We heard you, and implemented usage tracking into our editor, so you will never accidentally break your app again! An overview of all places where a component, action or variable is used, is now a single click away - and you can even modify these usages in-place!

SQL schema explorer

We know from experience that it is almost impossible to keep your entire data schema in your head. To give you better guidance when coding data source interactions with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Snowflake and Salesforce, you now see an overview of all tables and their fields on the right side of the action editor. No need to switch between Uify and your data tools ever again!

Additional improvements

• ^Multi-component dragging: Dragging multiple components at once has always been a bit buggy - this is now fixed and you can expect the same drag-and-drop experience, regardless of how many components you have selected.
• date-fns everywhere: We are relying on the popular date-fns library for working with dates. So far it used to be exclusively available in JS actions. But now it is available anywhere in the editor, even in programmatic component properties.
• Improved performance: We have worked hard on the performance of larger apps and of interactions with our UI editor on slower devices. We managed to reduce app structure size and computational complexity of code execution by  more than 80%, while interacting with our UI editor has become a whooping 3x faster than before! 🚀
• Bug fixes and minor improvements: Besides all those exciting features listed above, we have fixed 46 bugs and shipped 24 additional features to production this month.

For our closed beta users: We hope you enjoy the additional features that made it to production this month!

For those on the wait list: We will keep you posted on the progress towards our open beta. Feel free to drop me a line if you want to discuss a specific use case or simply can't wait to get started.

As you are reading this, we are already working hard to deliver more improvements in September - our next update will be a banger!

Cheers,
Dom