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
At Appian World 2025, something unexpected happened: I got publicly recognized as the #1 contributor to the Appian Community. Now, if you’ve ever listened to the Appian Rocks Podcast, you know I don’t usually make a big fuss about awards or shiny things. I’d rather talk about how to fix your broken task reports or… Read More I Got Rewarded! Now What?
