Creating a Conditional Compound Action

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As you’ve likely learned in other tutorials, a big part of Onit App building revolves around Actions. Most Actions are designed to accomplish one (and only one) task. For example, a Send Notification Action sends an email; an Add Participant Action adds a participant to a Record.

Many times, running a single Action won’t solve your larger business problem. Instead, you’ll need to string a series of individual Actions together to accomplish your goal. For instance, let’s say that when a user clicks a Button, your App should do the following:

1. Generate a document
2. Edit a field value
3. Add a participant to the Record

Since each of these things are handled via different Actions, you’ll need to configure Onit to run these Actions as a sequence in a specific order, one immediately after the other. How can you do this?

That’s where Conditional Compound Actions come into play. This special Action contains other sub-Actions, and runs them in a specific order. As a result, if you have a list of Actions that all need to run when a user clicks a Button (or a Business Rule fires), you can add those Actions into a Conditional Compound Action. When the Conditional Compound Action runs, it will run its contained sub-Actions.

Packaging Actions together like this reduces the redundancy of elements and keeps your Actions organized around business problems. Additionally, this is the only way to configure a Button or Business Rule to fire more than one Action.

In this tutorial, we’ll explain how to create and configure Conditional Compound Actions.

Creating an Action

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Actions are an essential type of building block within Onit Apps. They define what should happen when some event takes place during a transaction’s lifecycle. For example, you could build an Action that sends an email, and then configure that Action to run whenever a transaction is approved. In this example, the Action is the sending of the email.

Using the Liquid Editor

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Building Your First App

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No matter what type of business problems you are ultimately aiming to solve with Onit, you’ll always start by creating a basic App.

To do so, you’ll run through a simple Wizard, which will prompt you to create your App’s most fundamental components: its name, Fields, Roles, and Phases (among other things). Once you complete the Wizard, your new App will be created.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through the process of creating a brand new App from scratch using the Wizard. We’ll take you step-by-step through the process of launching the Wizard and moving through its screens. Along the way, we’ll highlight the Wizard’s most important settings and configuration options.

Release Notes - June 2019

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• You can now run bulk actions on all Records of an App. When you check the "Select All" checkbox on the first page, and then pick a bulk action, you get a confirmation dialog that allows you to run the Action on all pages, not just the first. If you select this option, the Actions will run in the background, and a user of your choice will receive an email notification when the process is done.

Using Complex Combo Fields

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When building an app, you’ll often want to offer users a dropdown Field from which they can select from a list of predefined options. In addition, sometimes you’ll want the options available in the dropdown list to automatically change based on the current value of an entirely different Field. In these situations, you’ll want to use a Complex Combo Field. These Field types can significantly increase the user-friendliness of your app, as they ensure that users will only see options that are currently relevant.

For instance, let’s say you have multiple managers for each department of your company. Using a Complex Combo Field, you can filter your manager Field’s dropdown options based on the value that a requester previously selected for the department Field. This ensures that the user will only see managers for the selected department.

Defining Custom Holidays

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Onit’s Holiday Provider App allows you to specify which days on a calendar should be considered “holidays” when executing Liquid-based date math. When a Holiday Provider App is created and configured, Onit’s add_business_days filter can exclude holidays that you define. Each holiday is represented by an individual Record in the Holiday Provider App.

Conditionally Hiding a Field

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Hidden Conditions can be used to dynamically show and hide an app’s Fields. This allows you to only display a Field to a user when it is relevant to do so.

For example, let’s say that you ask a user to choose a product_type from a dropdown list, and you provide the user with four possible options: Product A, Product B, Product C, and Other. If the user selects Other, you may then want to immediately display a Textarea Field to the user, so that he/she can type in a product name. In this example, you would create a Hidden Condition that essentially says, “Only show my Textarea Field if the user selects Other from product_type.”

Crash Course on Liquid

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Liquid is an open-source markup language that can be used to expand your App’s functionality.

Liquid can help you:

• Format data: If you have a number in a Field (e.g., 1000), you could format it as a currency value (e.g., $1,000.00) using Liquid. This might be necessary when using the number in an email or report.
• Perform Math: You could add two Fields together to calculate and populate the value of a third Field.
• Make Decisions: Liquid can help you build decision making into your App. For example, you can create “if/then” statements, which allow you to define how your App should behave in various situations.
• A whole lot more! The examples above barely scratch the surface. Once you learn Liquid’s basics, you’ll find many opportunities to expand your App’s functionality.

If you’ve never heard of Liquid before, not to worry! Learning the basics isn’t difficult, and does not require any programming knowledge. In many cases, you can achieve a great deal in an App with only a limited understanding of Liquid.

In this tutorial, we’ll cover Liquid’s basic concepts and syntax.

Release Notes - May 2019

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• Charts in suites now feature dashed scale lines for better visibility.