When we talk to customers about digital transformation, business applications, or modernizing legacy workflows, there is one common language everyone understands: the process. Customers don’t think in database schemas or API endpoints; they think in workflows, responsibilities, deadlines, and approvals. The business process is the mental model where we align with the business.Technologically, Appian has… Read More Record, Process, UI: The Core Trinity in Appian – and How to Keep Data Flow Clean

If you’ve been building in Appian for a while, you know the struggle: you update a record, navigate back to your dashboard, and… nothing. The old data is still staring you in the face. On the flip side, we’ve all seen interfaces that feel “heavy” or laggy because they’re re-running expensive queries every time a… Read More Performance vs. Freshness – Mastering a!refreshVariable

The management of reference data within the Appian platform has historically oscillated between discrete constants and database-backed lookup tables. While constants offer simplicity, they frequently lead to “constant explosion,” complicating the deployment lifecycle. Conversely, database tables can introduce unnecessary latency for UI-specific metadata like hex codes or icon names. And values stored in the database… Read More Architectural Strategies for Centralized Metadata Management in Appian

If you followed along our podcast Episode “7 Years of Process Reports“, you already know a few things about process reports in general, and task reports in particular. In this post, I want to dive a deeper into the details, and the dependencies between process, user input task, task interface, and task report. Task Information… Read More Information in Task Reports

I recently had the challenge to design a wizard user interface in Appian. But it was not that ordinary wizard with just a few static steps. It had to be a wizard with a dynamic dumber of steps. When looking at this from a UX perspective, I wanted to avoid surprising the user with a… Read More Combining Layouts

Like it or not, Excel is THE tool mankind is managing our planet with. When talking about Excel in an Appian context, we typically talk about importing and exporting data from, or into, an Excel file. For importing, my go-to approach is to dump the Excel into a text-only staging table, then use a stored… Read More Excel as a Record Data Source

Watching the webinar, requesting the update, analyzing the release notes, trying to find changes in the documentation. These are the four steps I do for each new version. Just like you do. Then I rework our guidelines for UX, UI and coding, and adjust our review procedures. And I prepare presentations to share the news,… Read More Appian Version 25.3

When digging into the details of the Appian 25.2 release, I discovered that I have to rethink my whole approach of how to manage user uploaded documents. Allow me to explain. The old Way In my application, I create a folder to store any documents users can upload. I assign Editor permissions to my users… Read More 25.2 Document Management

Think of a multistep wizard interface where some steps do not fit on the screen and require the user to scroll. While I think we should try to avoid this, but well, sometime we can’t. Now, the user navigates forward and back, and Appian keeps the scroll position between the individual steps, instead of resetting… Read More Managing Scrolling Behavior

Just recently, I had a conversation with my UX team about the various layout components in Appian, when to use them and how they work together, or not. Each of these layout components is made for a specific purpose, and I see it as my obligation as a professional Appian developer to understand in detail… Read More The Form Layout