Support Processes on Appian
Have you ever faced the challenge of setting up operational support processes for an Appian production environment? Look no further, I can help you with that! In a production environment, you want to provide access to the application to normal users only. This will make the application compliant and your security officer happy. Now we…
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Appian 23.3
Only one version left this year. I am voting for automatic database schema management for records. Or maybe 64bit integers, lambdas for looping functions, and a flux compensator … But let’s save the future for another time and focus on version 23.3. The big highlight is the AI Copilot that automatically translates PDF forms into…
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Overlapping Card Layouts
The layout components in Appian are pretty powerful for what Appian is made for. Just a few years ago, there were no colors available, and layouts could only be one or two columns. A lot has changed since then, and the challenge to create a rich UI turned from tech-limited into designer-limited. In one of…
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Task Reassignment vs. Collaboration
So, you got a task assigned and you accept it. Then you find out that you need support from a colleague and reassign it to that person. You would want to include a message to explain your desire. And you would want to see that activity being recorded to the audit trail of that specific…
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Universal Paging
When designing a user interface meant to display larger volumes of data to the user, we have to consider two important restrictions. These are available memory and screen space. The read-only grid in Appian does manage both in a clever way, as it tries to query and display data in batches defined by a start…
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The Working Time Problem
When you assign a task, you want to make sure that task gets done. In Appian, we use the built-in escalation and exception mechanism to manage task completion. If there is a lot of time available, such as several days or even weeks, we can easily define those times and ignore that an exception might…
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Popup Windows in Appian
I see many developers joining the Appian universe asking for popups. This seems to be a big thing in other environments, but Appian has none, except for Record actions. While this works extremely well within the paradigm of process-driven applications, which Appian is designed for, there are some scenarios in which I might want to…
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Highlighting Stuff in Text
In general, the text formatting capabilities are a bit limited in Appian. I consider this to be a good thing, as limiting choice to the right options makes development a lot easier. And we are talking about low-code, so this is part of the deal. Now, I had a requirement to highlight specific words in…
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Appian (R)evolutions
Appian just released version 23.2 with another set of evolutionary enhancements to the platform. In this post, I want to highlight my personal top three changes in that latest version. To make this more interesting for you, I pushed Appian to provide me with the latest version as early as possible, so I can share…
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The lottery is complete!
I am absolutely thrilled to announce that the book lottery has come to a close, and I am overwhelmed by the incredible response. We had a record-breaking number of over 120 participants who tried their luck to win a hand-signed copy of the world’s first book about the Appian low-code platform. Thank you all for…
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1st Anniversary
It is hard to believe, but the world’s first book about Appian just got one year old. HAPPY BIRTHDAY Writing the book was an interesting and challenging endeavour, and I learned a lot along the way. I already had experience training Appian novices, but the demands of structuring complex thought processes for writing a book…
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Formatting Labels in Appian
In Appian, we can display formatted text. But only inside a Richt-Text Display field. I will present a way to display labels, instructions, choiceLabels and tooltips in bold, italic or bold+italic. How this works … just apply the magic of unicode character substitution. Let’s have a look. Unicode Text in any computer is represented by…
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Designing Long Running Tasks
There are business processes out there which can take a very long time to complete. Think of claims management in an insurance company. When there is an ongoing law suite, this can take months or even years. But still, there are tasks in this process which need to be assigned, tracked and completed. Translating this…
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Query Data Expression Patterns
Designing expressions querying data is an example of reusability by the book. I am sure you already heard that you should follow the Don’t-Repeat-Yourself (DRY) principle. In most applications, you will probably need to query data from the same source in very similar ways multiple times. The most used are: To reduce the amount of…
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Working with Time in Appian
This is what the GPT chatbot thinks about time in software applications: Ticking clock ticks on, Code lines flow, time passes by. Virtual moments gone. And an image generated in a Salvador Dali – Cyberpunk style: I will probably leave the writing of poems and painting of pictures to the AIs. I think that time…
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Create New Items Using a Custom Picker
How to build a custom picker field in Appian, that allows to add new items.
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Make Software Conduct the Process
Digitally transform business process to free people from mindless activities.
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Robust Expression Design
Building applications using Appian is considered low-code. As low is more than no, we still have to apply some basic principles of software engineering.
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Low-Code Data Modeling
Low-code software development deserves a simplified approach to data modelling.
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The Magic of Null-Checking
Learn how to properly check local variables and rule inputs for Null and other sorts of invalid values in Appian.
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Building a Collapsible Tree
Building a collapsible tree component in #Appian using recursion and passing partially evaluated interface components.
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Building Customisable Components
Learn how to use advanced Appian expression language techniques to build customisable components.
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Appian 22.3
Sharing some thoughts and practical experience with the most significant feature of Appian 22.3.
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Complex Algorithms in Appian
Learn how to implement more complex algorithms in Appian using iterative of recursive approaches.
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Strict Security with Synchronized Records
In this post, I’ll show you how to implement a strict record-level security model controlling access per user. After looking at the approach used until recently, I’ll show you a simpler design that leverages the latest features around synchronized records. Database View Approach The implementation in Appian consists of a one-to-many relationship in the database…
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Complex Group Setups
Create a multi-level group setup in Appian which supports user created groups, rules based assignment and record level security.
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Task Exceptions & Quick Tasks
Keep User Input Tasks with Exceptions out of the user’s task list
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Update to Appian 22.2
Appian released the new version 22.2 of their software on May 27 2022. As with each of their quarterly updates, there is a larger number of smaller changes. In this post, I will highlight a few of these and the impact on how we built applications. Since my book “Low-Code Application Development with Appian” has…
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