March Round-up: Templates, JSON Form, and More Product Updates

If you’ve followed Appsmith for a while, you know that we can do a lot in 30 days!

I am here to give you all the deets; follow along!

A Headstart for Your Apps!

We’re launching templates! Our ready-made apps are easy to use, forkable, and are bound to give you a little nudge in the right direction. Directly connect your datasource and get customizing!

The Appsmith templates library will be an ever-growing forkable collection of pre-made applications. These apps span across use-cases that will speed up onboarding for new users and makes application development faster.

You can access templates on our website and inside your Appsmith dashboard.

Read the full announcement here.

All-New JSON Form Widget

We’ve just launched the JSON Form Widget, one of our most requested features. It’s live on the cloud app and will be live on the self-hosted app very soon. The JSON form widget is helpful for quickly generating (dynamic or otherwise) forms from JSON fields from queries, APIs, or JS Objects. Check out the documentation for more details.

Here's a short video on how you can generate a form from a table:

Read the full announcement here.

Promises in the Table Buttons

The table widget is one of the most used widgets on Appsmith; it gives the ability to convert column data into different data types, including buttons! With this, developers can add different actions on the onClick property of the button, for example, redirections, showing modals, running queries, etc. Appsmith supports JS throughout the platform using the moustache syntax, but using JS promises to execute actions in the sequence was limited. But now, we got you covered; the Table Button (columns that are set button type) also supports the async-await functions. All triggers are wrapped in a promise, so any missed error will result in an uncaught promise error.

Here’s a simple snippet that can be used in the table button’s onClick property to run a query and then show an alert:

{{
  (function() {
        // the .then will not run if the promise is not returned
        return MockApi.run()
            .then(() => showAlert('success'))
    })()
}}

New JS Powers to Icon Button Widget

Using JavaScript, we can dynamically add and choose icons in the icon button widget. This will allow developers to customize their applications based on conditions, actions, etc. Here’s a simple example: if you’re adding different links to an icon button widget, it can be super handy. You can update the button icon based on the URL – Google Icon when the icon button redirects to a google page, GitHub icon when the icon button redirects to a GitHub page, etc.

Not just that, you could also replace the close buttons on the modal with the Icon Button widget for more customization.

Product Updates

Updated Shortcuts for Ease

To create new queries on Appsmith using keyboard shortcuts, you’ll need to use Command/Control + Plus; previously, this was Option + Shift + N. To learn more about all the shortcuts on the platform, you can use Shift + ?.

Smart Substitution for known MongoDB Datatypes

Smart substitution handling helps users use MongoDB types like ObjectId or ISODate inside the quotes, and the query works correctly with MongoDB. With this, you can focus more on the logic than worrying about the request data. You can toggle this feature on and off on the query settings page:

Following are the MongoDB types that can be handled:

• ObjectId
• ISODate
• NumberLong
• NumberDecimal
• Timestamp

Email Notifications on Comments

Several developer teams love the commenting feature on Appsmith when building internal applications together. We've added that the comment author's email is set as the comment notification email to make it more fantastic. You can update these details from the settings page.

New Collaborations, Technical Content, Videos & Tutorials

Last month was crazy for us; we’ve published a couple of new blog posts and have successfully hosted four live events!

• We’ve written an in-depth tutorial on how you can dynamically generate PDF reports from Appsmith using n8n and APISheet. Note that this can also be done by using REST APIs from APISheet.
• Confidence, our Developer Advocate, made a few guides on using the select widget, adding search for table widget, and using a debugger on Appsmith. Do check them out :)
• We also created a very cool interview with our engineers Ashok and Rahul on how they’ve built a react library to improve the drag and drop experience on Appsmtth. Watch it here.
• Not just these, we also pulled out an awesome How Do I Do X on Appsmith (#2) session in our community where we discussed how you could use Pagination, do bulk uploads, and some cool hacks appsmith framework. Watch it here.

If you're curious about what we were up to, look no further and follow this link.

If you’re interested in using a database not listed on our website as an integration, please let us know about it by raising a PR on Github, and we will do our best to include it at the earliest.

Join our growing community on Discord, and follow us on Youtube and Twitter to stay up to date.