Part 2 of this series tracking the progress of the development of an app for our internal business management and workflow.
After an evening with Google Appsheet I finished with a fairly pleasing app on my phone containing property and people data. The 2 respective data sources (tables) for these are Google sheets – this is neat because the same tables can be used for receiving data from online forms. So, for example, a visitor to our website can (via an online form) register their details into the same table as that used by the app. Meaning that staff do not have a data-entry role when registering new people. That’s an improvement and a nice ‘marginal gain’.
The next challenge is to create a relationship between these tables and then create some basic functionality. eg, when I view a property, I want to see who the tenant is and who the landlord is. This looks fairly straight forward although seems to work a little differently to what I’m used to. Once this is resolved, then most of the data-storage and views will be very similar to incorporate – eg, I need a table for log records, a table for inspections etc. And, again, with relationships created between the tables, I should be able to view all the associated people, logs, inspections etc for any given property.
The other area to think about is data and GDPR. ❤
The other consideration is how to break-down our existing datasets into more manageable chunks. For example, each property has details about the address, and utilities, and particulars for marketing – these probably need to be 3 different tables and not one?
So schema design and setting up the primary keys (unique references that will be used in the relationships) are important.
Hopefully, in my next blog on this subject, I’ll have a skeleton app with multiple tables and relationships. Then I can start to look automation and functionality.
It’s good fun… no it really is! 😀