Book Image

Rapid Application Development with OutSystems

By : Ricardo Pereira
Book Image

Rapid Application Development with OutSystems

By: Ricardo Pereira

Overview of this book

OutSystems is a software development platform that speeds up the build phase by abstracting code and making almost everything visual. This means replacing textual language with visual artifacts that avoid lexical errors and speed up code composition using accelerators and predefined templates. The book begins by walking you through the fundamentals of the technology, along with a general overview of end-to-end web and mobile software development. You'll learn how to configure your personal area in the cloud and use the OutSystems IDE to connect with it. The book then shows you how to build a web application based on the best architectural and developmental practices in the market, and takes the same approach for the mobile paradigm. As you advance, you'll find out how to develop the same application, and the great potential of reusing code from one paradigm in another and the symbiosis between them is showcased.The only application that'll differ from the application in the exercise is the one used in business process technology (BPT), with a focus on a common market use case. By the end of this OutSystems book, you'll be able to develop enterprise-level applications on the web and mobile, integrating them with third parties and other systems on the market. You'll also understand the concepts of performance, security, and software construction and be able to apply them effectively.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: OutSystems 101
5
Section 2: The Magical Path of the Backend
10
Section 3: Create Value and Innovate with the Frontend
16
Section 4: Extensibility and Complexity of the OutSystems Platform

Introducing logic actions

Logic actions are the artifacts we use to manipulate data, perform calculations, and abstract the complexity of our application. In the backend, the actions used in logic are the Server Actions. This name is derived from the fact that actions are only run on the server side, and never on the client side.

Info

For the client side, we have Client Actions that are used in reactive web and mobile. This is the main topic of Chapter 10, Client-Side Logic.

These actions have a set of properties that allow a quick and accurate parameterization for your objective:

Figure 6.1 – Server Actions properties (based on official documentation)

A Server Action can have input variables, local variables, and output variables. These can be of any available type, including text, entity, and structure records, lists of records or structures, and even a composition of several types.

These variables allow us to manipulate information in...