How do I add a new database entity to my application?

Database Entities are the secret sauce of Bambuu. With them you can create sophisticated, valuable applications which will help you manage your data in many different ways. The easiest way to imagine entities is to think of them as a collection of 'things', i.e.things that you want to manage.

So for example a product is an entity (because you will typically want to manage a group of products in your database), as is a Contact or a Retailer or a Vehicle or even an Item. Once you have defined your entity or entities, you may need to also set up some categories. This is easy in Bambuu because you simply add the Categorised addon to the entity as we'll see below.

In some cases we will also set up a secondary set of 'things' which we want to use with our main Entities In this case we just define a new Entity and attach it to the other Entity we wish to modify.

Example? We have Restaurants as our main entity and set up Locations as our secondary Entity and then establish that a 'Location' has many 'Restaurants' using the One has Many block in the right sidebar of the Database tab.

But first things first. Let's set up a single Entity.

Go to the Database tab and drag the Entity block over to the main Bambuu Design Stack.

We will immediately be asked to name our Entity.

NB VERY IMPORTANT - do not use the plural (s) in naming otherwise you will break the application. Always name the Entity in the singular - i.e. item, NOT items.

Once we have our Entity defined (and after a few moments we will see the timer stop so we know the database elements have been created behind the scenes) we can start to work with it and customise it.

At this point the entity exists, but it has no specified form, because we have not defined any fields to give it shape. So click on the Fields 'add' link to start allocating fields to our Entity.

At this point we will see a number of choices of types of field we can add. The most common are String (a short text field suitable for names and suchlike), Integer (suitable for numbers) and Text (for larger amounts of text).

Let's select String. We can then enter in the text for the string field, often the first field will be 'name', and then continue adding additional fields by clicking on the Fields: + Add button as many times as we need until we have completed our database model.

Once we have all the fields defined we can take a look at adding additional entity modifiers which will give us more features. We do this by clicking on the Entity: Add-ons box and selecting the + Add button.

Here we can add categorisation for the entity, image upload, maps, comments and other attritbutes which will be attached to this particular entity. We can also select the Private box if we wish to make this Entity page invisible to site visitors until they sign in with a password.

When we are happy with this Entity we can add more of them by dragging the Entity button onto the Stack as many times as we need. The final part of the database tab involves specifying links between Entities if there are any, which we achieve by dragging over the 'One has Many' button and specifying which entities are connected in our model.

In this example we are declaring that every location can have many adverts, which allows us to associate different ads with a particular location, say London or the USA.

Once the whole database has been modelled in the Database tab of Bambuu, we can then start to customise the Entity Pages under the Pages tab in order to lay out the data for our application using drag and drop elements.