Book Image

Low-Code Application Development with Appian

By : Stefan Helzle
Book Image

Low-Code Application Development with Appian

By: Stefan Helzle

Overview of this book

This book is an exhaustive overview of how the Appian Low-Code BPM Suite enables tech-savvy professionals to rapidly automate business processes across their organization, integrating people, software bots, and data. This is crucial as 80% of all software development is expected to be carried out in low code by 2024. This practical guide helps you master business application development with Appian as a beginner low-code developer. You'll learn to automate business processes using Appian low-code, records, processes, and expressions quickly and on an enterprise scale. In a fictional development project, guided by step-by-step explanations of the concepts and practical examples, this book will empower you to transform complex business processes into software. At first, you’ll learn the power of no-code with Appian Quick Apps to solve some of your most crucial business challenges. You’ll then get to grips with the building blocks of an Appian, starting with no-code and advancing to low-code, eventually transforming complex business requirements into a working enterprise-ready application. By the end of this book, you'll be able to deploy Appian Quick Apps in minutes and successfully transform a complex business process into low-code process models, data, and UIs to deploy full-featured, enterprise-ready, process-driven, mobile-enabled apps.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: No-Code with Appian Quick Apps
11
Section 3: Implementing Software
17
Section 4: The Code in Appian Low-Code

Custom data types

A custom data type (CDT) in Appian defines a data structure made up of fields with a data type. The data type can be simple, such as Text or Date. A field can also use another CDT as a type, which creates a nested data structure. A field can be rendered as an array, which allows you to store a list of values in a single field.

While we will use CDTs to persist data to the database, the CDT does not do that on its own. It is just a data structure we use to define the types of objects and variables in the following places:

  • Variables in process models
  • Variables and rule inputs in expressions and interfaces
  • Entities in data stores
  • Exchanging data in integrations and Web APIs

    Tip

    There is no behind-the-scenes magic in Appian. If you want something to happen, you need to configure, model, or code it. All this is easy to do, but still needs to be done.

Creating the CDT

Follow these steps to create a new CDT:

  1. To create a new object in...