A No-Code Challenge from Microsoft - Response #2

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 second attempt, which I created on Caspio. 

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I used the same database as before (customer Id, customer name, address, distance from us in miles, sign-up date, action items) and imported it from Google Sheets. Once the data had been imported I selected the "Data Pages" tab and created a tabular report to display the customer records:

Next, I made a copy of the report, opened it and selected to filter the report with pre-defined criteria:

Once I picked the "distance" and "sign-up date" as the fields I wanted to use in my filter, I set the first criteria as "distance" less than or equal to "15":

And I set the sign-up date to "within the previous 7 days":

Once I made those changes, I previewed the report again and this time the only record displayed was the one record that met the two criteria:

Note: You can also set a different colored background for certain records with Caspio but it requires using some JavaScript statements. The exact steps you need to use (including the JavaScript) are laid out in detail at:

https://howto.caspio.com/tech-tips-and-articles/advanced-customizations/how-to-dynamically-change-the-background-of-a-results-page/ 

However, since this is supposed to be a "no-code" project I decided to leave this example as is and not bother trying to include the record coloring feature.

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.

A No-Code Challenge from Microsoft

I was reading an article** about Microsoft's "Power Fx" programming language when I came across this statement:

"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."

This example plays to the strength of Power Fx since it's built on the framework of Microsoft Excel, but the point is well taken. There are situations that strain the boundaries of what no-code platforms can do - but I'm not convinced that this is a fair test of no-code app platforms. I've decided to try creating the above example on different platforms to see if Microsoft is right.

I'll be publishing the results from time to time (with the label "Microsoft Challenge"...

** "Introducing Microsoft Power Fx: the low-code programming language for everyone", Ryan Cunningham, Director PM, Power Apps, March 2, 2021