We've released exciting new updates in App Builder designed to help you create high-performance applications like never before. Learn all about what's new and kickstart your app development.
Zdravko Kolev
6min read
Get ready to give a nice kickstart to your app development with the latest App Builder release! We’ve packed this update with powerful new features and enhancements designed to help you create high-performance apps like never before. In this blog, I’ll dive into these exciting additions and guide you on where to find them.
As you may know, we offer two tracks: the Production release, delivering stable, production-ready features, and the Preview release, tailored for early adopters eager to explore what we’re preparing in our development kitchen. The Preview track is all about testing, exploring, and gathering your invaluable feedback as early as possible. This approach accelerates our innovation and lets us showcase game-changing features ahead of the curve—something I’m confident will fuel App Builder’s growth and make a lasting impact.
Let’s dive in!
The Production release introduces Initial Advanced Filtering support across all Grids and the new Reorder Actions functionality. This feature lets you customize the execution order of actions triggered by component interactions, giving you greater control over your app’s behavior.
The Preview release includes everything from Production, plus some exciting additions: a Conversational AI Experience for streamlined app creation, a new Query Variable type—a specialized variable designed to interact with data sources, dynamically filtering large datasets via API requests with server-side filtering for peak performance—and the new Query Builder component, now available in the component toolbox.
Before diving into these new functionalities, if this is your first time learning about App Builder, let me quickly share why you should consider it a key tool in the application development process for your organization:
App Builder introduces a powerful feature: Initial Advanced Filtering, designed to empower end users with customizable data views right from the start. This client-side functionality allows users to construct their filtering expression tree, which is applied to Grids—such as Grid, TreeGrid, and HierarchicalGrid—upon initial load. By enabling this capability during app design time, users can tailor their data experience seamlessly, ensuring that the app launches with pre-filtered data aligned with their preferences.
Now you can define advanced filtering rules while configuring your Grid so that your data is automatically filtered when you run the app based on my pre-set conditions. This feature is universally available across all Grid types in App Builder and will generate code compatible with all supported platforms.
Functionality
You can modify the order in which the actions are executed and reorder the actions at any time by dragging and dropping (similarly in the reordering in the Outline panel). Actions are sequential, and async actions will be awaited before continuing with the next one.
The Query Builder component in App Builder operates through two key concepts. Check out the official step-by-step guide.
The Query Variable, currently available only as part of the Preview Environment, is a specialized variable that interacts with data sources, designed to efficiently handle large datasets by dynamically filtering data through API requests. These requests utilize server-side filtering, driven by advanced expressions as parameters, ensuring optimal performance when handling extensive data.
This variable integrates with the Query Builder component, allowing for dynamic data management and UI-driven filtering.
The Query Variable concept covers the two primary ways the Query Builder component is used:
This guide outlines how to implement a Query Builder Models and Utilities in your API Project, to enable user-defined queries. The implementation involves creating a controller, defining Query Builder models, and adding utilities for executing and generating SQL statements from these queries. The resulting customization will allow users to construct complex queries with subqueries support, filtering, logical operators, and field selection, executed efficiently against a data source.
The implementation is already part of the NorthwindAPI REST API project. Here are the examples for NorthwindAPI QueryBuilderController and NorthwindAPI QueryBuilder Models.
Now available in the Preview environment: Try out the new Chat UI experience for generating design elements with AI! This is an experimental feature, so issues may arise—but that’s exactly what we’re looking for. Your feedback will help us improve it!
In conclusion, App Builder is a game-changer in the app development process. With its cloud-based visual builder, low-code capabilities, and new features, it’s a must-have tool for any organization. Try it out today! If you need more details, we encourage you to check out our:
To experience everything in the latest App Builder updates, visit your customer portal and get the latest version. As usual, we are always excited to get your feedback and hear what you want to add or recommend. So please email me at zkolev@appbuilder.dev and let me know how we can help you continue delivering value to your customers with Infragistics.
App Builder's latest release expands on our efforts to provide you with the easiest way to build an app. Our new features will enhance your workflow significantly, allowing greater flexibility and shorter development time.
We’ve embraced the challenge of innovation throughout 2024, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with our App Builder and the UI components it integrates.
