App Management (organising/browsing apps)

Feature Requests
1

I’ve been with Anvil for a few months now and I’m coding and familiarising myself with the ‘anvilistic way’. Compared to low-code platforms, I can code, integrate and control much more here. Whether with or without CSS, HTML, JS - so much is possible, flexible and expandable.

What I - and not just me - miss, however, is ‘app management’ - a feature request that has been around for many years (2018!). Anvil is still weak here, isn’t it? That was six years ago? See here: folders (folders for organising projects and folders for apps) and organizing my apps or tags (tags for apps) have been suggested. Last time in October 2024.

Improvements have been made (2021: organization of apps. But with a growing number of code snippets, example apps for studying, custom components lib etc., it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep track. I try to make the file names meaningful and tag them, but this is not a permanent and good solution.

The organisation within an app is great (‘folders for forms’) (organising inside an app), so that the app structure can be organised in a meaningful way, but the organisation of apps in the IDE itself is missing (‘folders for apps’).

Any news on this topic / feature request?
How do you do it? Any tips and hints are welcome until this feature becomes reality! Thanks!

6 Likes
2

I don’t is the answer for me. I try to keep all my important projects locally via git and organize them in my local folder structure. Then I do a shotgun search when its not a locally managed app, using app names similar to how I would name a variable in my code.

1 Like
3

I use Chrome bookmarks to manage my Anvil apps. Since they’re synced across all my devices, it’s super convenient to keep everything up to date.

If I am in mouse mood, I navigate through a dedicated Anvil bookmarks folder, organized with subfolders and apps listed alphabetically.

If I am in keyboard mood, I hit Ctrl+L, then type @b, followed by a few letters of the app name, and scroll down to select it.

I work solo, and honestly, I don’t miss having folders in Anvil at all. Bookmarks cover everything I need.

Folders might come in handy for teams, though that opens up questions like who sees which apps and where, which can get a bit messy.

2 Likes
4

With an external “repository”, that opens the door to all sorts of options! Databases, outliners, even other Anvil Apps…

Add whatever distinctions you want on top of it. Might be a good place to keep App metadata…

IIRC, there’s a technique (a URL) for downloading one’s entire list of Apps, but I can’t find it among my bookmarks.

Edit: Found it! Thanks to you for making this more widely known.

2 Likes
5

Many thanks for all the good advice!
I need to tidy up my app clutter… :sweat_smile:

To group the apps and sort the snippets, I’m going to look at both the GitHub repo variant and the bookmark variant. The list with the overview of all available apps is great!

Okay, I have some work to do… Thank you!

6

That works fine, but what’s also missing is a way to find out which of my 600+ long forgotten apps is taking up 40% of my storage space, and which ones are published on the forum as replies and examples.

The former would require Anvil Central, the latter I feel is (technically) insoluble and would just require a week of trawling and note taking …

edit - actually, the first could also be done by opening and checking each app, but I’m approaching 60 and might not live long enough to do that!

1 Like
7

This is the job of an account dashboard, where you could see all the apps in order of last execution date, and all the tables in order of storage usage, and each table should show the list of apps using it.

2 Likes