Chapter 1: Hello, Informat! Start Building Your First Low-Code Application
Welcome to the world of Informat! If you're looking for a way to quickly and flexibly build your own business management software without getting stuck in complex programming code, then you've come to the right place. This quick start guide will take you on a wonderful journey, allowing you to experience the entire process of creating a complete application from scratch, just like building with blocks.
Are you ready? Let's begin!
1.1 What is Informat?
Informat is a powerful low-code application development platform (Informat Low-Code), which returns this creativity to every business person.
Simply put, Informat enables you to:
- Say goodbye to code, embrace business: You don't need to write a single line of code. Through a drag-and-drop interface, you can design data structures, build business processes, and create analysis charts. You can focus all your energy on "what needs to be done" rather than "how to write code".
- Applications change on demand: The market and business are always changing. With Informat, you can adjust application functions at any time, add a field, modify an approval process, as easily and quickly as modifying a document. This agility is a huge advantage of low-code development.
- Achieve data interconnection: Informat is not just about creating isolated applications; its powerful integration and data management capabilities can help you break down data silos within the enterprise, allowing information to flow smoothly between different departments and applications.
- Everyone is a developer: Whether you're a product manager, operations staff, HR specialist, or department supervisor, as long as you understand business, you can become a developer and create the most suitable digital tools for your team.
The core philosophy of Informat is "empowerment". It lowers the threshold of software development to the minimum, allowing everyone with ideas to become creators, quickly respond to changes, and drive business innovation.
1.2 What Are We Going to Build? — A Simple "Employee Information Management System"
To give you the most intuitive experience of Informat's charm, we will use a familiar scenario as a practical case: building an ultra-lightweight "Employee Information Management System".
Although this system is simple, "small but complete". It will help us manage the basic information of departments and employees.
We will build the skeleton of the application by creating the following two core data tables:
[Department Table]: Used to store department information, such as "R&D Department" and "Marketing Department", and specify the "Department Supervisor" for each department.
[Employee Table]: Used to record basic employee information, and each employee must clearly belong to one department in the [Department Table].
1.3 What Will You Learn in This Tutorial?
By building this "Employee Information Management System" with your own hands, you will not only gain a practical running application but more importantly, you will master the core skills of using Informat for application construction:
- Creating and configuring applications: Initialize your first Informat application from scratch.
- Data table design: Learn how to create data tables, define different types of fields such as text, numbers, and relationships, and build the data model of the application.
- View management: Learn how to set field display, filter conditions, etc., to meet different viewing needs.
This tutorial will adopt a step-by-step guidance approach, with a large number of screenshots and detailed step descriptions, ensuring that you can easily follow even without any technical background. Completing this tutorial will take approximately one to two hours.
In this tutorial, when involving specific concepts, we generally provide links to detailed explanations of related concepts. We recommend that you first follow the tutorial to complete the application construction during your first reading. After gaining an intuitive understanding of the application, you can come back and click on related links for deeper reading and learning.
Now, let's roll up our sleeves and officially enter the creative journey of Informat!