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

Adding application data

Your application, or, to be more specific, the implemented processes, also need a place to persist data. In contrast to the functional data already in the data model, we are now talking about operational data. We also need to think about specific requirements regarding process persistence, auditing, monitoring, and reporting.

Let's have a look at the important aspects of application data in the data model.

Process data

Each instance of the invoice validation process needs to store some data. I added the Case entity as a good baseline to the model shown in Figure 6.8.

Audit trail

The Activity entity is used to store information about who performed any case-related activities. The application will display the top time-consuming activities by analyzing the duration field.

Monitoring

Making management aware of the current performance of active process instances is called monitoring. To identify any additional required fields, let's...