Increase reusability with your own multi-entity blocks: Data sources with configured next-gen actions

With the latest Betty Blocks platform releases, you are now able to create data source blocks including configured next-generation actions with action steps. The value? As a low-coder, you can enable citizen developers to use data from another system with ready-to-go data sources in a very easy and quick way.

Recap: What are data sources?

Before we dive in, let’s do a quick recap of what data sources are. With data sources, you are able to create connections to data resources in systems outside the Betty Blocks platform and seamlessly integrate data to enrich the information in your Betty Blocks applications. All without synchronizing the data and ending up with multiple datasets of the same source.

Why do you want this?

Previously, you were able to set up a data source for HighQ, for instance, and transform it into a block in the block store for others in your organization to use. The CRUD actions get generated the moment you create the data source, and with the new functionality of multi-entity blocks, you are now able to fill the CRUD actions with the correct functions and save it as a whole in a block.

The citizen developers of your organization are now provided with ready-to-go data sources and don’t need to bother creating actions anymore. This way, low-coders only have to build them once, while everyone in the organization can reuse them.

How to create data sources including next-gen actions?

1. After setting up the data source of your choice - we will take HighQ as an example - you add a model from the data source HighQ that you want to use to your Betty Blocks application. The model comes with a set of CRUD actions which you need to configure with action steps.
2. By clicking on your remote model and proceeding through to actions, you can open the Create for remote model xx action. Drag the create record function onto your action canvas and configure the model and property values. Do this for all the actions you want to configure.
3. Go back to the data model overview and click on your data source. Click on the Save as data source block, fill in the name of the block and release it to the block store. You can choose for whom the block is available as well.

When you made the block available for the whole organization, your citizen developers are now able to install your data source including actions block in their own application.

Good to know

We enabled you to create multi-entity blocks to support reusability. As a low-coder, you know exactly which use cases with custom requirements are needed to build using data sources. And therefore, you still need to configure the action steps and share it as a block yourself.

What’s next?

In Q2, we will add the functionality to enable developers to add configurations to their multi-entity blocks. Besides that, we will start filling the public multi-entity blocks with the most common HighQ and iManage use cases as well.

That was all for now, your feedback allows us to continuously improve our product. Please let us know what you think about it. Happy building! 😃

Documentation:
Setting your remote data source

Relevant articles: 
Data sources
​​New Block Store capabilities for reusability