The application is the basic structure of the Navigator365 system. It is a set of forms, procedures, lists, menus, and other system elements that form a logical entity. This article describes these items in general. Understanding the meaning of individual elements is essential to gaining knowledge about the details related to the implementation of individual application elements.
You can learn more about developing applications in Navigator365 in this article.
General info #
Every organization has something like a business card with all of the basic information about the business.
Usually, business cards consist of company details, representative details, logos, and contact information. The application in the Navigator365 system has its own “business cards”, which we call the general info section. There you can find the application name, description, unique icon, and GUID – a special, globally unique string of characters that is produced to identify the app.
Forms #
Every organization, regardless of size, encounters documents. There are many types, such as official documents (business opening confirmation), legal documents (contracts), financial documents (bills, invoices), and many more. Each company or institution uses specific document templates. The absence of such standards would result in an organizational disorder and almost certainly cause a waste of time and money.
The equivalent of the document templates in Navigator365 is the Form. The form looks like a questionnaire. The data entered in it can be used to create system documents and the corresponding templates. A form in Navigator365 is a collection of fields of a specific type, created to retrieve and organize user input. As in paper questionnaires, the fields are also divided into sections, fields required and not required. In the paper versions, you can find fields that require only data entry and those that require calculations too. Unlike paper ones, electronic forms are dynamic. In the Navigator365 system, you can decide which fields are required and at what stage of the process. You can determine when fields should appear to the user. You can make the appearance of these fields dependent on the data entered, and much more.
You can learn more about creating forms in this article.
In the picture below, you can see an Opportunity form from our CRM application. This is a form that salesperson fills out when they have a new selling opportunity.
Lists #
Imagine a stack of documents lying on your desk, a multitude of binders stacked on shelves, and tons of documents organized in an archive. Surely you can guess how much work it costs to keep everything in order. We can compare the lists in Navigator365 precisely to these shelves and binders.
Lists store documents created from forms. Just as each document binder has a name that defines its purpose, the same is also true for system lists. You can group documents in a binder any way you like. You can sort them, add bookmarks, and much more. In the Navigator365 system, you can do the same using the functionality associated with lists. Now you may be wondering why you need the system or application when you can do the same thing with traditional methods. Well, in the system, you can do it incomparably faster, and you can use the space taken up by tons of documents for something else. Your data is safely stored digitally to protect it from physical destruction. Can you say the same for paper documents during floods or fires?
You can learn more about creating lists in this article.
Processes #
Every company, even the smallest, has its procedures. Of course, if the company is not large, usually these procedures are simple and informal. The larger the company, the more often its management decides to introduce formalized procedures. They often take the form of dozens of pages of documents, where the responsibilities of employees for particular duties are described in detail. They contain a lot of text, tables, graphs, and other elements. The more extensive the procedure, the more easily mistakes can be made. To facilitate the use of procedures, the BPMN standard was developed in 2004 and a second version – in 2014.
The equivalent of procedures in the Navigator365 system are processes. The system uses a similar notation to the BPMN standard, with the difference that it has been extended with all the advantages that systems and applications offer. Processes in Navigator365 are usually associated with documents and can therefore automatically answer to any changes in them. The path of a process can vary depending on the fulfillment of the relevant conditions. Many tasks can be done automatically without user participation, such as creating new documents on a database and transferring information between them. It is easy to imagine how much time and money can be saved in this manner by avoiding the errors that user actions could bring.
You can learn more about processes in this article.
In the gif below, you can see a BPMN diagram for the contract workflow process, going from registering data in the system (with the help of previously mentioned forms), to signing the contract and automatically sending it via email.
Menu #
Menus are the basic navigational element of any application, which is why they have also been implemented in Navigator365. Menus can be compared to document drawers that have business cards taped on them with information about what is inside. When you open a drawer, you expect to find what the business card suggests. By clicking on the menu item of the created application, you can easily go to the place you need at the moment. In Navigator365 before the name of the item, you can add an icon so that it will be even more highlighted and more readable for the user.
You can learn more about the application menu in this article.
Connections with API #
Let’s try to imagine what extensions are, based on the equipment in a typical office. Every office has multiple rooms. Each of them usually contains desks, computers, cabinets, printers, and essential office supplies. Every employee works using these tools and items. Sometimes, however, they turn out to be insufficient to perform their duties effectively. For example, it may turn out that an ordinary printer is inadequate for scanning, printing, and copying hundreds of documents a day, while at the same time, printing costs become very high. The entrepreneurial owner therefore decides to lease a Xerox machine or use a third-party printing company. As a result, work becomes more comfortable, more efficient and cheaper.
The analogy is the connectivity with API (Application Programming Interfaces). APIs provide a flexible, modular, and scalable foundation for building and extending software applications. Using our Call REST API action can unwind unlimited possibilities to automate processes in the organization.
You can learn more about API from our tutorials in Academia.