A No-Code Challenge From Microsoft - Response #1

In a post the other day, I mentioned that I came across a statement in an article about Microsoft's Power Fx language that read:

"The truth is, point-and-click tools are great for quickly assembling experiences and workflows, but many real-world solutions need a layer of logic that goes beyond what is practical to drag and drop, for example:

Show a list of customers who signed up in the last 7 days within 15 miles of this location.

Highlight the newest entries in green.

When a user clicks for more details, if the record has outstanding action items associated with it, pop those to the top of the screen."

I wanted to find out how true that statement is, so I decided to try building an app on no-code platforms that met those criteria. Below is my first attempt, which I created on Airtable. 

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Before I even started I decided to include the customer information and the "action items" together, in a single data base table. If I were doing this for real I would have set up a separate "base" for the action items and linked them to customers in the customer base, but for this experiment I took the easy way out and just set up a "long text" field for the action items. The other fields in my customer base are customer id, customer name, address, distance (in miles) from a central address, and signup date (when the customer signed up with us). 

I set up a field for distance from "our location" because I assumed that we're talking about a business that serves multiple customers from some central address. Since that's the case, it would make sense to simply take a minute or so when the customer record is being created and use Google Maps to enter the distance to the customer's address.

After I entered a few customer records (including multiple action items) my base looked like this:

At this point I had to make another decision. The Microsoft article said to select customers who had signed up within the last 7 days and lived within 15 miles of our location and then added a requirement to highlight the newest records in green. I'm assuming that meant to highlight the customers who had signed up in the last 7 days, but in any case to do something like that on Airtable requires a paid "Pro" subscription and I didn't feel like buying a subscription just to do this example. Besides, I've always felt that if you want to look at a subset of your data, you should show only that data. So instead of doing any record highlighting I decided to just filter for the records I wanted and show only those records.

To set up the two filters, I clicked on "Filter" (the funnel icon) and clicked "+ Add filter". Then I selected the available options to create a filter that read "Where Distance less than or equal to 15". Next, I clicked "Add filter" and built a second filter reading "SignUp_Date is within the past number of days: 7":

Applying those two filters left me with this (the only record that matched both criteria):

To look at all the action items for this record I clicked on the "Actions" field, then hit the Shift and Space keys:

Once I pressed the Shift and Space keys, the 3 actions items for this customer displayed. 

That was the final result for my attempt to meet Microsoft's example of something that's very difficult to do with a no-code app. It may have been a little different from how you would do it on Power Fx, but personally, I felt like this version on Airtable met the challenge.