Anvil User Group June 25

Announcements
1

Hey Everyone!

@danbolinson and I will be reviving the Anvil User Group calls this year! Here’s our agenda for the 1 hour call:

  1. 5 minutes - Quick Intros (Name, what you use Anvil for)
  2. 5 minutes - Breakout rooms for 5 minute get-to-know-you chats
  3. 15 minutes - Anvil team will showcase the new layouts/custom components features, with Q&A
  4. 15 minutes - Dan will showcase Anvil X, with Q&A
  5. 20 minutes - General discussion

By RSVPing to this event using the buttons above, you can add the event to your calendar. See screenshot below:

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Here’s another link to the call below.

Anvil User Group June 2024
Tuesday, June 25 · 11:00am – 12:00pm
Time zone: America/Toronto
Google Meet joining info
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/oeb-ggeh-wzn
Or dial: ‪(CA) +1 705-419-9978‬ PIN: ‪904 844 315‬#
More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/oeb-ggeh-wzn?pin=8693299535753

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@yahiakalabs Thank you for reviving this! I’m looking forward to putting faces to the names that I see so often on these forums.

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4

bumping this thread!

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Thanks everyone for joining! Here’s a summary of our call:

Callers from: Canada, USA, UK, Germany, South Africa, others

What people are working on: logistics, freelancing, accounting, consulting, internal tools

Layouts

  • Reuse page structures with slots
  • Layouts can be nested within other layouts
  • Slot objects (self.layout.slots[’something’]) - are a set of instructions on how to add components to a structure
  • Layouts are reused when you are opening different pages with the same layout. It’ll just clear the slots and reload them.
  • Questions
    • Can you communicate between forms and layouts?
      • Yes! By raising an event or setting a property on the parent layout
      • Also by accessing self.layout
    • Can I convert an existing form to be based on a layout?
      • You can but it is better to create a new form
    • What does self.layout do when you’re nesting layouts?
      • goes to the first layout your form is using
    • I use anvil-extras routing which has caching.
      • You can use routing with anvil-extras routing
    • How does layouts call events on its user?
      • event handlers on the forms that use the layout
    • Are the new features taking into account the routing features of anvil-extras?
      • Definitely informed by the adoption of anvil-extras features!

Anvil X

  • Tableau extensions with Anvil
  • IFrame that runs the tableau extension
  • Two-way interactions between Tableau and Anvil iframe
  • Add capability for more interaction in Tableau dashboards - do things instead of just view things
  • Competes with power apps framework in the Microsoft ecosystem
  • Power BI extensions is woefully underpowered compared to Tableau extensions
  • Questions
    • Is it feasible to build PowerBI extensions in Anvil?
      • Much harder than doing it with Tableau
    • how does the communication happen?
      • manifest file in Tableau dashboard allows 2 way communication between tableau and anvil api
    • Why build in Tableau ?
      • Speed to insight - building good dashobards in Tableau is fast

General Questions

  • CDN or load balancing - does it work?
    • Yes, mostly. Generally Anvil plays well with Cloudflare
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