Planning your application
Summarize
Summary of Planning your application
Planning your application before building it in App Engine Studio helps streamline development and ensures a clear understanding of the app’s purpose and user needs. This initial step involves defining the application’s use case, visualizing its workflow, and outlining functional requirements to identify potential issues early and guide the creation process effectively.
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Key Steps in Planning Your Application
- Identify the use case: Determine the problem your application solves and who will use it. For example, managing employee travel requests involving employees, managers, regional heads, and travel desk agents.
- Visualize the workflow: Map out the end-to-end process your app will follow, including task sequences, decision points, loops, and exit actions, to understand the complete user journey.
- Outline functional requirements: Define personas and their tasks within the app, the data the app must collect, the processes to automate, and how logic and automation will control workflows and notifications.
Considerations for Functional Requirements
- Personas and tasks: Identify who uses the app and their roles, such as employees submitting requests, managers approving, and agents booking travel.
- Data collection: Specify necessary data fields, like travel destinations, dates, and costs.
- Logic and automation: Use logic to control workflow steps (e.g., approvals before forwarding requests) and automation to trigger updates and notifications (e.g., status changes on rejection).
- Roles and permissions: Plan user access levels and capabilities, which can be configured later in App Engine Studio.
- Data organization: Decide how to structure data across tables based on application processes, with detailed configuration in subsequent steps.
Next Steps
After completing your application plan, proceed to build your app within App Engine Studio by creating the application, developing the data model, designing user experiences, adding logic and automation, and testing the app following the guided tutorial steps.
Plan out your application before building it in App Engine Studio to streamline the development process.
When you want to build an application, the first thing you should do is develop a plan for the app. Planning involves outlining what the application does and identifying who will use the application. By planning your application, you can better understand the purpose of your application and address potential issues before development begins.
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Adding logic and automation |
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| 0:17 | Identify the use case for your application. |
| 0:21 | Visualize the workflow for your application. |
| 0:42 | Outline the functional requirements for your app. |
Step 1: Identify the use case for your application
Start by identifying the use case for your application. In our tutorial, we’re creating an application to manage employee travel requests for an organization. The app automates the entire travel request process and involves users such as employees, managers, regional heads, and travel desk agents as needed.
Consider the problem that you aim to solve with your application. To determine if your use case is a good fit for the tools featured in this tutorial, see Plan your app development.
Step 2: Visualize the workflow for your application
Once you have identified the use case for your application, visualize the end-to-end workflow for the application. The end-to-end workflow is the sequence of actions an application follows to complete a task or process.
To visualize the end-to-end workflow for your application, map out what your application does from start to finish. Include any loops that lead back to earlier steps in the workflow and any actions that cause you to exit the workflow.
Step 3: Outline the functional requirements for your app
It's also important to consider the functional requirements of your application. The functional requirements of an application include who uses the application, what tasks they perform in the app, and what data the app must collect to support these tasks.
Use the following prompts to outline the functional requirements for your application:
- Identify the personas who use your application and consider what tasks they perform.
In our tutorial, the personas who use the employee travel request application and their associated tasks are:
Persona Tasks Employees Submit travel requests Managers and regional heads Approve or deny travel requests Travel desk agents Book travel and complete follow-up tasks - Determine the data that your application must collect.
For example, the application in our tutorial must collect details about employees' travel requests, including:
- Where the employee is traveling to and from
- When the travel occurs
- How much the travel costs
- Choose the process or processes that you want to automate in the workflow for your application using logic and automation.
Review the following table to see how we plan to use logic and automation in our tutorial application.
What it does Tutorial application example Logic Controls how and when certain actions occur in your application workflow. Verifies that an employee's travel request is only forwarded to the travel desk after it has been approved by both the manager and the regional head. Automation Sets up automatic processes based on the logic that you define. Updates the employee's travel request case status and sends email notifications whenever a travel request is rejected. - Consider the roles and permissions for your application.
Roles determine whether users have access to application content. Permissions are the individual abilities that a user has within application content, such as creating, reading, updating, and deleting. You can determine the roles for your application and configure permissions for each role at a later step in the tutorial. For more information about roles in App Engine Studio, see Configure AES personas and roles.
- Think about how you want to organize the data collected by your application.
The data that your application collects is automatically stored in tables. You might want to organize the data across different tables, depending on the processes that your application completes. You can decide how you want to organize the data for your application a later step in the tutorial. For more information about data organization in App Engine Studio, see Create a data model for your application.
Next steps
Once you’ve developed a plan for your application, you can begin building the application in App Engine Studio. Proceed to the next step: Create an app.